Core:
noun, the most important part of a thing, the essence; from the
Latin cor, meaning heart.

Volume 1.21

Featured Webpages Trove

July 1, 2002

Added June 24, 2002

Climate
Changing, U.S. Says in Report (06/03/02)In The New York Times by Andrew C. Revkin
In a stark shift for the Bush administration, the United States
has sent a climate report to the United Nations detailing specific and
far-reaching effects that it says global warming will inflict on the American
environment. In the report, the administration for the first time mostly
blames human actions for recent global warming. It says the main culprit
is the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere.

White
House defends U-turn on global warming (06/04/02)In The Washington Times by George Archibald
The White House yesterday defended the about-face on global warming
contained in its report to the United Nations on climate change. The report
marked the first Bush administration agreement with environmental activists
that recent global warming is caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases
in the atmosphere from human use of fossil fuels.... White House spokesman
Scott McClellan yesterday defended the report, issued Friday by the Environmental
Protection Agency, by pointing to its language reiterating the administrations
stance that, Mr. McClellan said, there remains considerable uncertainty
in current understanding of how climate varies naturally. The administration
says such uncertainty backs its opposition to the Kyoto treatys
goal of cutting U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 7 percent from their
1990 levels between 2008 to 2012.

Bush
burned by climate report (06/08/02)By Henry Lamb at WorldNetDaily
Despite a flurry of media reports to the contrary, the Bush administrations
policy on climate change has not flip-flopped. The media frenzy followed
the release of a U.S. Climate Assessment Report prepared for the U.N.
Framework Convention on Climate Change.... Most of the individuals who
prepared the report are holdovers from the Clinton-Gore era, who are known
proponents of the global-warming theory. It is also widely known that
some of Bushs high-level appointments are also proponents of the
theory, even though Bush, himself, has expressed strong reservations.
Release of the report was not intended to be an announcement of a change
in policy  it was simply compliance with treaty requirements.

Dont
tell Dubya (06/09/02)By Robert Novak in The Chicago Sun-Times
The Environmental Protection Agency report warning of global warming
dangers was issued without President Bushs being informed in advance,
even though it seemed to contradict his long-held position. Thats
why Bush dismissed what the EPA did as a report put out by the bureaucracy.
The president did not mention EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman,
the former governor of New Jersey who has frequently clashed with the
White House.

C.I.A.
Was Tracking Hijacker Months Earlier Than It Had Said (06/03/02)In The New York Times by David Johnston and Elizabeth
Becker
The officials said the C.I.A. learned in early 2001 that Khalid
al-Midhar, who died in the attack on the Pentagon, was linked to a suspect
in the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in October 2000. The agency
had said previously that it did not learn of Mr. Midhars connections
to Al Qaeda or his multiple visits to the United States until the month
before the hijackings, when an increase in chatter about terrorist
threats prompted a review of the C.I.A.s terrorism files.

Face
to Face With a Terrorist: Government Worker Recalls Mohamed Atta Seeking
Funds Before Sept. 11 (06/06/02)By Brian Ross at ABC News
Four of the hijackers who attacked America on Sept. 11 tried to
get government loans to finance their plots, including ringleader Mohamed
Atta, who sought $650,000 to modify a crop-duster, a government loan officer
[Johnelle Bryant] told ABCNEWS.... Atta also expressed an interest in
visiting New York, specifically the World Trade Center, and asked Bryant
about security there. He inquired about other American cities, including
Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago. Prompted by a souvenir she
had on her desk, he also expressed interest in the Dallas Cowboys
football stadium, mentioning that the team was Americas team
and the stadium had a hole in the roof.

The
Other Shoe: Obsessing over Sept. 11 distracts us from preventing the next
attack. (06/07/02)By Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal
At the same time the institutions that keep us up and humming, or
at least help keep us mutually invested in and respectful of each other
and our way of life, continue to wobble and groan from the weight of their
misconduct. The American Catholic Church is a victim of self-inflicted
wounds, its corruptions as towering as its cathedrals. Big business 
Enronned. Wall Street  stock tipped, finagled and fooled by a bubble.
Big accounting, by which we judge how our business investments are doing,
is a joke. The FBI and the CIA are more joke fodder. Our serious journalists
are focused on todays testimony, tonights game and the 2004
Democratic presidential primaries. The others do shark attacks and entertainment
awards. Our intellectuals are off on various toots, most of them either
irrelevant  the latest edition of the New York Review of Books leads
with stories on David Brock, Clarence Thomas, Sexy Puritans, Peggy Guggenheim
and Noel Coward  or all too relevant and wrong.

Wartime
Distractions (06/04/02)By John Podhoretz in The New York Post
The war did not end with the regime change in Afghanistan. Nor did
it end with the removal of the last girder from Ground Zero. Its
still ongoing. The CIA-FBI-Congress-media frenzy is the way the Washington
game was played before the war on terrorism. For a while, it seemed that
game had at last been retired in the wake of Sept. 11. It should have
been. But you could sense a kind of perverse relief on the part of the
media and governmental Establishment that the old game could still be
played.

A
Few Very Good Men: Priest Recruiter Bill Parent Is Looking for Those Who
Have Seen the Light (06/09/02)In The Washington Post by Phil McCombs
Whats most surprising, in talking with the seminarians and
young priests and new deacons-at the reception and later by phone-is that,
far from being discouraged by the scandals that have rocked the church,
they seem filled with new fervor, as McCarrick indicated. These are hard-charging
guys-tough, determined, full of life and good humor, a palpable sense
of joy. Most come from solid Catholic homes, had careers before they went
to seminary, and wanted success, cars, romance-all the stuff of modern
life. But something kept nagging, and although they ran and hid and wrestled
with demons and angels they knew deep down what it was.

Celibate
and Loving It: For Many Priests, True Happiness Lies in The Joining of
Self and Church (06/06/02)In The Washington Post by a Staff Writer
Part of the point of celibacy, for Catholics, is to confront people
with something bigger than biology, society, music, dancing, writing,
painting, advertising. And sex. Celibates also turn around the supposition
this life is a heroic renunciation. They say celibacy is not No. It is
Yes. Maybe. Anyway, it's not just a Catholic thing.

The
Body of Christ and the spring meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops
(06/09/02)By Francis Cardinal George, OMI, in The Catholic New
World
A crisis of authority in the Church cannot be resolved if bishops
don’t act like bishops. A bishop has responsibility before Christ for
keeping people united to Christ. A bishop therefore sets boundaries, in
the matter of sexual misconduct or any other matter; but, more fundamentally,
he encourages people to live virtuously in Christ. When people are “in
Christ” and not full of themselves and their own lives, they are the Church.
Since the bishop is the visible point of reference for union with Christ,
people divorced from their bishop are not part of the apostolic Church.
Hence the terrible trial for the Church when priests and people and bishops
are not together in purpose and in life.

The
Bishops and the Vatican (06/10/02)By Avery Cardinal Dulles in The New York Times
The bishops are understandably concerned to show that they are taking
bold and decisive measures. But they should take care not to lock the
church into positions that will later prove to be unwise. If they yield
too much to the present atmosphere of panic, the Holy See can be relied
upon to safeguard the theological and canonical tradition. The many levels
of authority in the church are a precious resource.

Tearful
FBI Agent Apologizes To Sept. 11 Families and Victims (05/30/02)At Cybercast News Service by Jeff Johnson
In a memorandum written 91 days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,
an FBI agent warned that Americans would die as a result of the bureaus
failure to adequately pursue investigations of terrorists living in the
country. FBI Special Agent Robert Wright, Jr., who wrote the memo, led
a four-year investigation into terrorist money laundering in the United
States. Wright began crying as he concluded his remarks at a Washington
press conference Thursday.

FBI
admits bureau missed clues of Sept. 11 attacks (05/30/02)In The Oklahoman by Ted Bridis of Associated Press
FBI Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday there may have been more
missed clues before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He also suggested
for the first time that investigators might have uncovered the plot if
they had been more diligent about pursuing leads. The jury is still
out on all of it, Mueller said, during a wideranging, two-hour presentation
at FBI headquarters. Looking at it right now, I cant say for
sure it would not have, that there wasnt a possibility that we could
have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers.

Stop
frisking crippled nuns (06/01/02)By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
So you’re at Newark standing in line behind a young Saudi male and
an 87-year-old arthritic nun from Des Moines. Who’ll be asked to remove
his or her shoes? Six out of ten times, it’ll be the nun. Three out of
ten times, you. One out of ten, Abdumb al-Dumber. Even if this is just
for show, what it’s showing is profound official faintheartedness.

Liberal
Reality Check (05/31/02)By Nicholas D. Kristof in The New York Times
One reason aggressive agents were restrained as they tried to go
after Zacarias Moussaoui is that liberals like myself  and the news
media caldron in which I toil and trouble  have regularly excoriated
law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial
profiling. As long as were pointing fingers, we should peer into
the mirror. The timidity of bureau headquarters is indefensible. But it
reflected not just myopic careerism but also an environment (that we who
care about civil liberties helped create) in which officials were afraid
of being assailed as insensitive storm troopers.

In
the mind of a would-be suicide bomber (05/30/02)In The Jerusalem Post by David Rudge
Underlying it all, however, were the teachings which preach the
need for jihad to create a just and equal, non-corrupt and non-criminal
society by the spread and unification of Islam. .... I also
began to imagine the people I would be killing, whether they would be
women and children, families sitting down at a cafe. I became a bit disillusioned,
because I had been told to blow myself up in any event, she said.
This meant to me that what was important for them was to succeed
in perpetrating an attack, whether there were casualties or not, and then
they would be able to pat themselves on the back. I felt like they were
playing a game with the blood of the martyrs.

Shin
Bet, IDF nab reluctant female suicide bombers (05/30/02)In Haaretz by Staff
25-year-old Tanzim activist from Jaba in the northern West Bank
was planning to carry out a suicide strike in Jerusalem. Hamamra told
reporters she had decided to go ahead with the attack for personal
reasons but wouldnt give further details.... She said after
she had completed the training, she had a change of heart and decided
not to go through with the plan. She said: I began to think about
killing people  babies, women, sick people, and to imagine my family
sitting in a restaurant and someone coming in and blowing them up.
Hamamra said she feared God would not see it as a good reason for
committing suicide and therefore would not accept me as a shaheed.

My
fellow Muslims, we must fight anti-Semitism (05/26/02)In Haaretz by Joseph Algazy
Ramadan, 39, is not only an outstanding Muslim intellectual but
also the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hassan
Al-Bana, who was murdered in his own country in 1949. He firmly condemns
the anti-Semitic incidents that took place during the past year in France,
Belgium and other European countries, such as attacks on synagogues and
Jewish institutions. Too few Muslims have spoken out against these
anti-Semitic and Judeophobic phenomena, he says. In his opinion,
any attempt to afford legitimization to anti-Semitism on the basis of
texts taken from the Islamic tradition, and as an expression of protest
against the suffering of the Palestinians, must be firmly rejected.

The
Elderly Man and the Sea? Test Sanitizes Literary Texts (05/02/02)In The New York Times by N. R. Kleinfield
In a feat of literary sleuth work, Ms. Heifetz, the mother of a
high school senior and a weaver from Brooklyn, inspected 10 high school
English exams from the past three years and discovered that the vast majority
of the passages  drawn from the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer,
Anton Chekhov and William Maxwell, among others  had been sanitized
of virtually any reference to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity,
alcohol, even the mildest profanity and just about anything that might
offend someone for some reason. Students had to write essays and answer
questions based on these doctored versions  versions that were clearly
marked as the work of the widely known authors.

Political
Diversity Lacking in Many UNC-CH Departments (May 2002)In Carolina Journal by Jon Sanders
A survey of faculty members in nine departments at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has found that more than four-fifths
are registered Democrats. The results of the survey, conducted by the
conservative student magazine Carolina Review for its March issue, called
into question UNC-CHs devotion to diversity. The results were not
unique; in 1996, The Daily Tar Heel examined eight departments and found
a similar disparity: 91 percent of professors who were registered with
a major political party were Democrats, while 9 percent were registered
Republicans.

The
unhyphenating of America: Census finds fewer citing European roots
(05/31/02)In The Boston Globe by Cindy Rodriquez and Bill Dedman
Four centuries after the Pilgrims reached Plymouth Rock, European-Americans
are cutting their ancestral roots. In the last decade, the number of Americans
who said they were English, Irish, or from another European derivation
dropped by at least 32 million, according to new Census 2000 data. Six
million more people than 10 years ago, about 20 million, listed their
ancestry as American or USA. And millions more
left it blank.

UN
Misses the Forest for the Trees (05/22/02)By Alex A. Avery of Hudson Institute
We suggest that the United Nations work to accelerate market reforms,
property rights protections, and the rule of law so that people in developing
nations can increase their standards of living. Moreover, the UN should
work much harder than it has in the past to increase the productivity
of farmers in developing countries.... It is just too bad that Greenpeace,
Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, and the other groups that
are supposedly concerned about biodiversity continue to be distracted
by fights over fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology as the forest
burns around them.

Weakland
apologizes for his sinfulness (05/31/02)In The Journal-Sentinel by Staff
Former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland apologized to his parishioners
tonight for the scandal that has occurred because of my sinfulness,
saying he felt remorse, shame, contrition and emptiness over
a relationship he had 20 years ago with a man and the archdioceses
subsequent $450,000 payment to silence him. Weakland also revealed that,
contrary to earlier statements, his income from honoria and writing projects
over his 25 years as archbishop did not cover the amount of the settlement.
In my remaining years, I will continue to contribute to the archdiocese
whatever I can, he said, and, of course, the archdiocese will
receive whatever effects I own on my death.

Text:
Weaklands apology (05/31/02)In The Journal-Sentinel
I come before you today to apologize and beg forgiveness. I know
 and I am sure you do too  that the Church to be authentic
must be a community that heals. But I also know  and you do too
 that there is no healing unless it is based on truth. In my remarks
I will do my best. I apologize to all the faithful of this Archdiocese
which I love so much, to all its people and clergy, for the scandal that
has occurred because of my sinfulness. Long ago, I placed that sinfulness
in God’s loving and forgiving heart, but now and into the future I worry
about those whose faith may be shaken by my acts.

Added June 10, 2002

Finger
Pointing (05/25/02)By Linda Chavez in The Washington Post
So what should the president have done in August 2001 after he was
warned that intelligence sources thought an attack against American interests
was likely in the not-too-distant future? If the president had gone public
with the information, he probably would have been rebuked by the very
same people who are raising a fuss now because he didnt speak out
sooner.

What
Clinton Knew (05/21/02)By Dick Morris in The New York Post
If Bush did not know much about al Qaeda intentions before 9/11,
why didnt he? The blame rests not on his incumbency, then only months
old, but on that of his predecessor.... So, even had Bush received notification
of the nature of al Qaedas plans, there was little he could have
done, in the weeks before 9/11, to stymie them. Clinton and Gore had simply
not left behind them the tools to permit an increase in airport security.

FBI
Memo Author Did Not Envision Sept. 11 (05/23/02)In The Washington Post by Bill Miller and Dan Eggen
The Phoenix FBI agent who wrote a memo last summer warning about
possible terrorists at U.S. flight schools told lawmakers yesterday that
he never expected officials at FBI headquarters to respond immediately
to his suggestion for an investigation and that he never envisioned the
kinds of attacks that took place Sept. 11. Although his memo cautioned
that al Qaeda members might be training at U.S. aviation schools, FBI
agent Kenneth Williams told congressional panels in secret hearings yesterday
and Tuesday that none of the information in the document could have led
investigators to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, according to officials
familiar with his testimony.

Low
Profile: The real scandal of the Phoenix memo isnt that it was ignored
 its why it was ignored. (05/24/02)By Christopher Caldwell in The Weekly Standard
The real scandal of the FBI memo is that it wasnt passed up
the line. And we can make a pretty good guess why it wasnt. In May
8 hearings held by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein asked
FBI director Robert Mueller what had happened. Mueller replied, There
are more than 2,000 aviation academies in the United States. The latest
figure I think I heard is something like 20,000 students attending them.
And it was perceived that this would be a monumental undertaking without
any specificity as to particular persons; the individuals who were being
investigated by that agent in Phoenix were not the individuals that were
involved in the September 11 attack. What a load of nonsense. Any
small-town newspaper reporter could have narrowed down that 20,000 to
under a hundred in an afternoon, just by focusing on names like... oh,
I dont know... try Mohamed, Walid, Marwan, and Hamza. Couldnt
the entire FBI have done the same?

Letter
contends FBI unit had dots to connect (05/25/02)In The Chicago Tribune by Stephen J. Hedges and Cam Simpson
A letter to Congress from an FBI lawyer suggests that at least a
week before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, FBI officials in Washington
had a broader knowledge of flight training activities by men with terrorist
connections than has been previously disclosed.... Rowleys letter,
which expresses her frustration that it took three weeks from Moussaouis
arrest before her office was told of the Phoenix investigation, is the
strongest suggestion yet that someone within FBI headquarters had a working
knowledge of both cases, and had acted on them together.

Social
Security memo gives GOP smoking gun (05/24/02)In The Washington Times by Stephen Dinan
Republicans have obtained a congressional staff memo they say proves
that Democrats want to use Social Security for scare tactics, not serious
debate. The memo, mistakenly sent by e-mail to a Republican staff member
on Capitol Hill, contains an apparent draft opinion piece on Social Security
and reaction from staffers in the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Ohio Democrat....
But another Kaptur staff member responded that the information in the
opinion piece was not entirely factually accurate, adding:
Talk about scaring seniors  this may be a little over the
top. But it is sooo fun to bash Republicans. She included an e-mail
smiley face  :)  after her comment.

Ammunition
in a Battle for Souls (05/22/02)In The New York Times by Daniel J. Wakin
Over the past four months, while Catholics have publicly debated
and suffered over their churchs scandals, most other Christian denominations
have stayed aloof, perhaps aware of a certain aphorism about stones and
glass houses, and also sympathetic. Most evangelical Christians would
say they have no interest in capitalizing on Catholicisms woe. But
when asked, they do not hesitate to find the scandals roots in Catholic
dogma, and some go even further. In a few cases, priests say, the scandal
is being thrown in Catholic faces by proselytizing neighbors. And others
who study the evangelical world suggest that the scandal will be used
as a wedge in the long struggle between Catholics and evangelicals for
Latino souls.

Report:
Weakland sexually abused former student, paid for silence (05/23/02)By The Associated Press in The Journal-Sentinel
Roman Catholic Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee agreed in
1998 to pay $450,000 to a man who accused him of sexual assault, according
to documents cited Thursday by ABC News. ABC said the agreement had required
Paul J. Marcoux, 53, to keep silent. I was involved in a cover-up.
I accepted money to be silent about it, not to speak out against what
was going on, Marcoux said in an interview broadcast on Good
Morning America.

Pope
accepts Weaklands resignation (05/25/02)In The Journal-Sentinel by Tom Heinen
Pope John Paul II has quickly granted Archbishop Rembert G. Weaklands
request to speed up his retirement, with the Vatican announcing on Friday
that Weaklands resignation had been accepted. The moment that action
was communicated to Weakland, he was officially retired and Auxiliary
Bishop Richard J. Sklba assumed Weaklands duties.

Weaklands
views take on new meaning after scandal (05/25/02)In The Journal-Sentinel by Dave Umhoefer
How much, the faithful are left to wonder, did Weaklands struggles
with sexual questions and the until-now private accusations of abuse against
him color his actions in defending and dealing with priests in similar
situations over the years? How did they affect his controversial views
about teenage victims in such cases?

Catholic
Bishops Refuse Communion To Homosexual Activists (05/20/02)At Cybercast News Service by Patrick Goodenough
Homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law, they close
the sexual act to the gift of life, Archbishop George Pell told
Catholics gathered for Pentecost Sunday Mass at St. Marys Cathedral
in Sydney. In an orchestrated move, 20 members of a group campaigning
for the church to give full recognition to homosexual Catholics had earlier
gone forward for communion, while another 12 did the same St. Patricks
Cathedral in another major city, Melbourne. Each member of the Rainbow
Sash Movement (RSM) wore a rainbow-colored sash over their clothing. In
both churches they were denied communion, although in Melbourne, Archbishop
Denis Hart did offer the sash-wearers a blessing.

The
Bishop Is Back (05/22/02)On ABC7 News by The I-Team
Patrick Ziemann was the first bishop ever to be sued by a priest
for sexual assault. He resigned from the Santa Rosa diocese, and the church
paid more than half a million dollars to settle the case. In light of
the recent sex scandals across the country, we wondered what is Ziemann
doing now. The answer has some North Bay Catholics shocked and dismayed.
When we found him in Arizona three weeks ago, Bishop Patrick Ziemann didnt
want to discuss the mess he left behind in Santa Rosa  his sexual
misconduct and severe financial mismanagement.... A church spokesman says
Ziemanns past prohibits him from acting as a priest in the Tucson
Diocese. But, he is allowed to work inside the monastery with young men
who want to become priests and with people who are going through some
crisis in their lives, who go there for guidance. 

Cardinal
Coverup (05/02/02)In New Times LA by Ron Russell
Yet in his pell-mell rush to be seen as the cardinal with a plan,
all the while playing a gullible local mainstream press like a harp in
diverting attention from his own dismal record of protecting pedo-priests,
Mahonys actions amounted to little more than a public-relations
snow job.... In fact, most of his publicly announced ideas for dealing
with the sex-abuse crisis, including those he unveiled amid much fanfare
before jetting off to Rome along with other American cardinals to meet
with the pope this month, werent Mahonys at all. They had
been forced on him, kicking and screaming, as it were, last August as
conditions for settling a potentially explosive sex-abuse case involving
the former principal of a prominent Catholic high school in Orange County,
Monsignor Michael Harris.

Four
Sue Cardinal Over Sexual Abuse (05/21/02)At Yahoo! News by Paul Wilborn of Associated Press
Four men filed a racketeering lawsuit against Cardinal Roger Mahony
that accuses him of protecting a priest who allegedly molested several
children in the nations largest archdiocese. The suit, which seeks
unspecified damages, cites federal laws involving conspiracy in a criminal
enterprise. It was filed Monday in a state court.

A
cardinal who gets it (05/23/02)By Adrian Walker in The Boston Globe
He believes it is time for clergy to set an example by living more
simply. He further believes the mansion he lives in, which has been the
scene of overnight stays by a pope and a president, is unnecessarily lavish.
And his archdiocese may face the prospect of paying damages to victims
of sexual abuse. Therefore, the cardinal  Francis E. George of Chicago
 announced this week that he will seek permission to sell his residence,
one of the more lavish in the city.

Battling
poison with ink and holy water (05/12/02)By David House in The Star-Telegram
Ive read many U.S. news reports about this issue. I agree
with Christine Chinlund  the reader advocate at The Boston Globe,
where the pedophilia story broke last January  that coverage has
been factual, well-documented, even-handed, and the product of commendably
aggressive but fair and persistent inquiry. The news media will follow
developments in this scandal, and not because they have found a delightfully
marvelous mountain of muck to rake. You may hear otherwise. Think twice
about believing it. The truth is that the media are confronting an evil
on behalf of millions of people, including the many selfless priests who
have been unjustly smeared.

When
in Dallas (05/17/02)By Editorial Staff of Commonweal
The toxicity of this scandal lies not only in pernicious decisions
over the years, but also in the manner that senior church officials have
handled the current crisis. There has been a failure of episcopal leadership
in kowtowing to cardinals and in remaining silent. Just as many priests
have been affected by the sins of the few, so too have many bishops. Their
June meeting gives them a singular opportunity to begin bailing out a
ship that is in grave danger of sinking.

Seriously
ill historians book-in-progress tells of his changed views
(05/24/02)In The Miami Herald by Brett Martel of Associated
Press
In what he fears may be his dying days, cancer-stricken historian
Stephen E. Ambrose spends much of his time at his word processor, trying
to set the record straight about some of the views he espoused as a young
professor. Perhaps best known for his 1994 best seller D-Day, Ambrose,
66, has put a World War II project about the Pacific on hold in favor
of a new book depicting his own transformation from a left-wing demonstrator
to a super patriot.

Now
girls have the advantage in school (05/22/02)By Katherine Kersten in The Star Tribune
Is there gender bias in American schools? Evidence is growing that
the answer is yes. But if you think its girls who are suffering,
youre wrong. Today, boys are on the short end of the academic stick,
and their performance gap with girls is both startling and alarming. Thus
far, few educators have acknowledged or addressed the problem of widespread
male academic underachievement. 

Why
are U.S. universities moral wastelands? (05/21/02)By Dennis Prager at WorldNetDaily
The vast majority of Americans believe that Americas war against
Islamic terror is a moral one, that the Iraqi, Iranian and North Korean
regimes are evil, and that Israels war for survival is a just war.
They also believe that colleges should not have dormitories or graduation
ceremonies segregated by race or ethnicity.... In sum, if the universities
are morally right, Americans are, by and large, morally wrong, and America
is indeed the malevolent force in the world that so many colleges depict
it as. On the other hand, if Americans are by and large right about the
greatest moral issues of the day, and America, with all its flaws, really
is the greatest force for good in the world, our universities are, with
a few exceptions, moral wastelands.

College
recruiters look to gays: But schools see problem in identifying students
(05/21/02)In The Boston Globe by Patrick Healy
Last Saturday, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and about 40 other New England
colleges  as well as top private institutions outside the region,
like Stanford and Grinnell  sent representatives to Boston for the
nations first college fair for gay high school students. Colleges
were invited for the first time to the annual Youth Pride celebration
for gay teenagers as a way to broaden the event. Several admissions officials
had also asked regional gay organizations about ways to recruit these
students, said chief organizer Mark Taggart of the Massachusetts Governors
Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. 

College
Commencements Still Dominated By Liberals (05/21/02)At Cybercast News Service by Matt Pyeatt
Young Americas Foundation (YAF) released its study Monday
and found that the list of the nations commencement speakers leans
heavily to the left. The report also shows that schools not listed in
the top 50 colleges and universities also lack representation from conservatives
at commencement. For the ninth consecutive year, our most prestigious
schools excluded scholars such as Milton Friedman, Clarence Thomas, Antonin
Scalia and Thomas Sowell for the likes of left-wing activists Morris Dees,
Lani Guinier, Madeline Albright and Whoopi Goldberg, Ron Robinson,
president of YAF, said. College administrators are using commencement
ceremonies to send their students off with one more predictable leftist
lecture.

Principals
should stop preaching, start teaching (05/22/02)By Bruce Ramsey in The Seattle Times
Dear principals: Stop saving the world. A dream of racial brotherhood
does not justify labeling Seattles kids White and Colored
(or whatever your labels are) and shuffling them around to Do Good. Brotherhood
will not result. Anyway, the people of Washington had a vote, and
you lost. If you would prepare students for success in the world, hammer
on academics, academics, academics. That was John Stanfords message.
Academics! If certain schools are weak, make them strong. That is your
job.

Harvard
to award more Bs, raise honors standards (05/22/02)In The Boston Globe by Patrick Healy
Concerned that grade inflation has become pervasive at Harvard University,
the schools faculty yesterday committed itself to awarding more
Bs to students and voted to sharply raise academic requirements
for honors, which went to a record 91 percent of graduating seniors last
June. For the first time, Harvard will cap the number of students receiving
summa, magna, and cum laude, starting with the current freshman class.
No more than 60 percent of seniors will be eligible, and cut-off scores
will be raised to make honors harder to achieve.

Anti-Semitic
Pogrom at San Francisco State (05/09/02)By Laurie Zoloth at FrontPage Magazine
I cannot fully express what it feels like to walk across campus
daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters
of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies,
labeled canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according
to Jewish rites under American license, past poster after poster
calling out Zionism = racism, and Jews = Nazis. This is not
civic discourse, this is not free speech, and this is the Weimar Republic
with brown shirts it cannot control. This is the casual introduction of
the medieval blood libel and virulent hatred smeared around our campus
in a manner so ordinary that it hardly excites concern  except if
you are a Jew, and you understand that hateful words have always led to
hateful deeds.

Jewish
Blood Libel Poster at SFSU (April 2002)By Scott Armel-Funkhouser of University of California
at Berkeley
This poster, funded by the Associated Students of San Francisco
State University, was posted on campus in April 2002. This is perhaps
the most grotesque and explicit incarnation of the blood libel
observed in the free world since the Nazi Holocaust. It was generated
on the campus of a public university by students, using public money.
The poster included the names of the following organizations: Associated
Students, GUPS (General Union of Palestinian Students), MSA (Muslim Student
Association) and WIA (unidentified). The poster incorporates the two
most common elements to this medieval racist slur. It suggests (1) that
Jews ingest the flesh and/or blood of children, and (2) that there are
rites associated with the Jewish religion which detail how to perform
this cannibalism. Note that this vicious racism is not directed specifically
at Israel but at Jews, for it reads, slaughtered according to
Jewish rites.

Anti-Semitic
riot at San Francisco State University (05/16/02)By Melissa Radler in The Jerusalem Post
After being surrounded by a mob of students shouting, Hitler
didnt finish the job, and Get out or well kill
you, pro-Israel students at San Francisco State University are finally
finding an ally against hate. The university president is so fed-up with
the hate-filled atmosphere on the Bay Area campus that he has asked the
local district attorneys office to help bring pro-Palestinian hate-mongers
to justice.

Colleges
Only Protect PC Speech, Groups (05/16/02)By Glenn Harlan Reynolds at FoxNews
But so far this event, and the university’s tepid response, is simply
the latest stage in a long-standing and widespread trend of giving some
student groups the permission to engage in behavior that the university
would not permit for a moment if it came from groups not favored as politically
correct. The result of impunity, of course, is escalation. Just as the
toleration of broken windows and other petty acts of lawbreaking
leads to more serious crime, so a policy of tolerating acts of lawlessness
by overpoliticized students leads to more serious problems.

University
of South Carolina Mandates Political Indoctrination and Orthodoxy
(05/13/02)At Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
The University of South Carolina (USC), in a required course for
a degree-granting program, has adopted Guidelines for Classroom
Discussion that demand adherence to a narrow set of partisan political
assumptions  on pain of being graded poorly for honest disagreement.
Although USC is a public institution, bound by the First Amendment, it
has created an ideological loyalty oath that constitutes a
profound threat to both freedom of speech and freedom of conscience in
South Carolina and across the country.

Womens
studies mandates seen as threats to free speech (05/16/02)By Ellen Sorokin in The Washington Times
The course syllabus, distributed in January, specifically outlines
eight prerequisites during class discussion, which counts for 20 percent
of the students overall grade. The course  Womens
Studies 797: Seminar in Womens Studies — is listed on the
programs Web site as required for a certificate of graduate
study in womens studies. One of the prerequisites is that students
acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism and other
institutionalized forms of oppression exist.

Berkeley
Course on Mideast Raises Concerns (05/16/02)In The New York Times by Chris Gaither
The political tensions in the Middle East have once again roiled
the University of California, with the most recent incident focused on
a catalog course description.... The listing for the course, The
Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance, one of the choices
for a required course in reading and composition, was pulled for review
last week by university officials after protests by civil liberties and
pro-Israeli groups.... The last line of his course description drew the
most ire, especially among civil libertarians: Conservative thinkers
are encouraged to seek other sections.

Replacing
Airport Screeners Proves Tough (05/15/02)In Washington Post by Sara Kehaulani Goo
After 4,800 people applied for 600 federal airport screening jobs
at Baltimore-Washington International, the Transportation Security Administration
confidently removed the job application from its Web site. Then the problems
started. Hundreds of applicants either failed the governments tests
for prospective screeners or they didnt even show up for the exam,
according to a TSA official. Surprisingly, the numbers of the latter
were higher than we expected, he said.

Global
Warming Models Labeled Fairy Tale By Team of Scientists
(05/14/02)At Cybercast News Service by Marc Morano
A team of international scientists Monday said climate models showing
global warming are based on a fairy tale of computer projections.
The scientists met on Capitol Hill to expose what they see as a dearth
of scientific evidence about global warming. Hartwig Volz, a geophysicist
with the RWE Research Lab in Germany questioned the merit of the climate
projections coming from the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC.) The IPCC climate projections have fueled
worldwide support for the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to restrict the greenhouse
gases thought to cause global warming.

Climate
change faults and fears (05/12/02)By Pete du Pont in The Washington Times
While climate models cannot be expected to simulate future weather,
they should be able to accurately depict the Earths present climate
and to simulate changes in the frequency and type of the weather events
that make up climate. Since they cannot, GCM predictions of
climate change are statistical exercises with little bearing on reality
and certainly should not serve as the basis for government policy.

Jimmy
Carter: America basher (05/15/02)By Jonah Goldberg at TownHall
Its an unusual thing for a former president to more or less
choose sides against the United States and with a hostile nation ruled
by a ruthless dictator. Unusual, that is, in the sense that most U.S.
presidents  current or former  dont do this sort of
thing. Unfortunately, Carter is the exception that proves the rule.

Death
rattle? (05/13/02)By Laura Miller at Salon
Beyond the familiar schism between the Sunnis and the Shiites, the
faith is spectacularly diverse, from the mystical brotherhoods of the
Sufis, to the puritanical Wahabbites, to (what remains of) the relatively
secularized cosmopolitan elites of more developed countries like Egypt.
It makes as much sense to draw conclusions about all Muslims on the basis
of the beliefs of the Taliban or bin Laden as it does to expect a Quaker
to light candles to Santa Barbara or a Unitarian minister to plant bombs
in abortion clinics simply because other people who call themselves Christians
do so.

Beyond
the Numbers: A hopeless state (05/15/02)By Ron Dermer in The Jerusalem Post
In fact, the recipe for making a suicide bomber is one part fanaticism
and one part hope. The fanaticism is bred in a culture of death, where
terrorist recruits are meticulously brainwashed to believe that their
noble ends justify any means. Still, a fanatical mindset only sets the
fuse. Hope is the spark that lights it. Suicide bombers would not be so
quick to die if they didnt believe that the cause they so fanatically
pursue will be advanced by their sacrifice.

Gazas
Children Worship Martyrdom (05/14/02)In The Washington Post by Hamza Hendawi
In Gazas funerals for shaheeds, or martyrs, and
in rallies by Palestinian factions such as Arafats Fatah or the
militant Islamic group Hamas, children as young as three or four are outfitted
with combat fatigues, masks and toy guns. Such occasions routinely attract
hundreds of children, all accustomed by now to the deafening noise made
by gunmen firing in the air.

Exploding
Myths: Why Israels war on terrorism is working. (05/13/02)By Jonathan Chait at Slate
Palestinian terrorism does not result from Israels occupation
of the West Bank and Gaza, but from Israels existence. Palestinian
terrorism long predates the 1967 occupation; the Palestine Liberation
Organization was formed in 1964, three years earlier. But hasnt
the more recent phenomenon of suicide bombing come about because of long-simmering
Palestinian despair? Not really. Suicide bombings started only after the
1993 Oslo Accords, which provided Palestinians with their best opportunity
for a state.

Columnist
Andrew Sullivan Bites Paper; Paper Bites Back (05/14/02)In The Washington Post by Howard Kurtz
Andrew Sullivan, the confrontational conservative columnist, has
been attempting the high-wire act of writing for the New York Times while
frequently whacking the Times for liberal bias on his Web site. Now the
tightrope has snapped. Sullivan, who once wrote a biweekly column for
the New York Times Magazine, says he has been barred indefinitely
from writing any more for the magazine. The popular Weblog writer
says the directive came from Executive Editor Howell Raines. 

New
York Times v. Sullivan (05/14/02)By Nick Schulz at Tech Central Station
There is already chatter among the chattering asses dissecting Sullivans
banishment. Slates Mickey Kaus and John Ellis of Fast Company fame
suggest it is because of Raines need for control. Meanwhile the
folks at The American Prospect  the terrific lefty publication edited
by Robert Kuttner  say that explanation is way off base. Actually,
they call it paranoid. They say Sullivan was dropped because
he has taken shots at the Times for its biased coverage and shoddy reporting.

The
Cultures of Newsrooms: A Book Unfit for The New York Times
(05/15/02)By Nat Hentoff in The Village Voice
Unlike Bernard Goldbergs bestselling Bias, McGowans
Coloring the News has received generally favorable reviews, even
in such papers as The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times,
which are sharply criticized in his book. But the influential New York
Times Book Review has so far ignored McGowans indictment of much
of the press  an analysis that, as Peter Schrag, no right-winger,
says in the Columbia Journalism Review, has focused attention
on important and troubling issues.

The
news we heard from a guy at Handgun Control (05/16/02)By Ann Coulter at Town Hall
But for bald-faced lies, nothing beats the [New York] Times
preposterous characterization of Supreme Court precedent. The most recent
case directly raising the Second Amendment was United States vs. Miller,
decided in 1939.... The Miller case simply defined the types of guns protected
by the Second Amendment. Reviewing the case of two bootleggers charged
with failing to pay federal taxes on a sawed-off shotgun, the court concluded
that the instrument was not covered by the Second Amendment.

Guns
are bad. The New York Times says so. (05/08/02)By David Nieporent at Jumping to Conclusions
The Justice Department submitted briefs to the Supreme Court on
Monday that said that the Second Amendment protected an individual right,
not just a collective right, to bear arms.... And then the [New York]
Times had to try to prove that this is a novel theory, that John Ashcroft
was going against established law. Unfortunately, since he wasnt,
the Times had to make something up: The Supreme Courts view
has been that the the Second Amendment protected only those rights that
have some reasonable relationship to the preservation of efficiency
of a well regulated militia, as the court put it in United States
v. Miller, a 1939 decision that remains the courts latest word on
the subject. Actually, this cleverly clips the Supreme Court quote
in just the right part so that she can paraphrase it incorrectly.

Lawyer
says animals have rights too (05/17/02)In Contra Costa Times from Reuters
Basing his arguments on well-documented studies of their mental
powers, emotional bonds, social skills, language and self-awareness, Wise
says there is also increasing evidence to suggest that African elephants,
African Gray parrots, honeybees and dogs may merit such legal rights.
In an age when it would be unthinkable to use newborn human babies, the
profoundly senile, or the insane for biomedical research or display them
for public entertainment, Wise asks why dolphins, chimps or elephants
 some of whom are more sophisticated than tiny infants  should
have to endure such indignities.

Fighting
for Moe: Activists Pursuing Legal Status for Animals One Case at a Time
(05/13/02)At ABCNews.com by Amanda Onion
Moes owners think they know whats best for him. So does
the city of West Covina, Calif., so does the Animal Legal Defense Fund,
and so does the director of a local sanctuary. The problem is, even though
hes 36 years old, Moe the chimp cant speak for himself. Thats
partly why the custody battle between Moes owners and the city of
West Covina has continued for nearly four years. Its also why a
growing cadre of prominent lawyers is lobbying to broaden the way we define
all animals and animal rights in the U.S. court system.

Germany
votes for animal rights (05/15/02)At CNN without Byline
A majority of lawmakers in the Bundestag voted on Friday to add
and animals to a clause that obliges the state to respect
and protect the dignity of humans. The main impact of the measure will
be to restrict the use of animals in experiments. In the end 543 lawmakers
in Germanys lower house of parliament voted in favour of giving
animals constitutional rights. Nineteen voted against it and 15 abstained.

Darwinism
in a flutter (05/11/02)Review by Peter D. Smith ofOf Moths and Men: Intrigue,
Tragedy & the Peppered Mothat Guardian Unlimited
The question Hooper sets out to answer is why such a shoddy piece
of scientific research was so readily accepted by the scientific community
and allowed to attain iconic status in evolutionary biology. Her answer:
because scientists wanted to believe it. Once it had been cited enough
times, it became an irrefutable article of faith. Hoopers meticulous
research provides a fascinating insight into the fallibility of scientists
 after all, as she points out, they are only human.

Anchor
Steam: Why the Evening News is Worse Than OReilly
(05/10/02)By Rob Walker at The New Republic Online
So what did I learn in three weeks of watching the evening news?
Basically that the network news, which defends itself against detractors
by invoking the earnest sobriety of its broadcasts, contains as much hype
and fake populism as any of its cable competitors. In fact, in some ways
its actually worse. As distasteful as the cable shout fests can
be, they generally assume that their viewers can handle a detailed discussion,
conflicting views, and lengthy segments on a particular issue.

Why
is morality a dirty word? (05/13/02)By Dennis Byrne in The Chicago Tribune
We are a diverse nation founded on respect for others beliefs,
religious or otherwise. But that principle has become subverted by this
hell-bent determination to avoid discussion of the moral aspects of conduct.
When you think of it, this avoidance makes no sense, because we are a
nation operating on such concepts as justice and equality  concepts
that are fundamentally moral in nature.

Christianity
turns the other cheek: Where is the outrage when a church is desecrated?
(05/13/02)By Raymond J. de Souza in The National Post
It needs to be said. The occupation of the Church of the Nativity
by armed Palestinian terrorists was a gravely anti-Christian act. Much
has been made of how the basilica was filthy but not seriously damaged.
To speak only of what happens to a church physically is to miss the point.
One of Christianitys holiest shrines was profaned by armed terrorists.
It is blasphemy to use the house of God as a military refuge. For more
than a month, the faithful were denied access to the basilica to pray
while the gunmen used its status as a house of prayer as a tactical advantage.

Reliving
9/11: Too Much? Too Soon? (05/12/02)In The New York Times by Julie Salamon
Television has long been the defining medium for great and terrible
national events like war, assassinations and presidential elections. But
nothing in the past has generated this sheer volume of reportage and commentary,
because Sept. 11 was an unprecedented event occurring in an age of unprecedented
media exposure.... The variety and quantity have been staggering 
valuable (much of it), but also alarming.

Megachurches
as Minitowns (05/09/02)In The New York Times by Patricia Leigh Brown
Southeast Christian is an example of a new breed of megachurch 
a full-service 24/7 sprawling village, which offers many of
the conveniences and trappings of secular life wrapped around a spiritual
core. It is possible to eat, shop, go to school, bank, work out, scale
a rock-climbing wall and pray there, all without leaving the grounds.
These churches are becoming civic in a way unimaginable since the 13th
century and its cathedral towns. No longer simply places to worship, they
have become part resort, part mall, part extended family and part town
square.

Is
anti-Catholicism the new anti-Semitism? (05/09/02)By Rev. Ephraem Chifley in The Age
Considering that most instances of paedophilia involve not priests
but live-in step-fathers, clerical celibacy cannot be considered a significant
element in this tragedy. Strange, isnt it, that cartoonists and
comedians dont make jokes about paedophilia and mums new boyfriend,
or that there are so few voices calling for a royal commission into marriage
break-up and child protection? That, of course, would call for society
to examine its substitution of personal fulfilment for duty  far
easier to attack a large and slow-moving target, like the church, especially
as it is apt frequently to say inconvenient and frightening things.

Doing
Nothing is Something (05/13/02)By Anna Quindlen in Newsweek via MSNBC
It is not simply that it is pathetic to consider the lives of children
who dont have a moment between piano and dance and homework to talk
about their day or just search for split ends, an enormously satisfying
leisure-time activity of my youth. There is also ample psychological research
suggesting that what we might call doing nothing is when human
beings actually do their best thinking, and when creativity comes to call.
Perhaps we are creating an entire generation of people whose ability to
think outside the box, as the current parlance of business has it, is
being systematically stunted by scheduling.

Whos
ugly now? (05/04/02)By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
Muslims killed thousands of Americans, but America doesn’t have
anti-Muslim political parties — just a goofy President who hosts a month
of Ramadan knees-ups at the White House and enjoins schoolkids to get
an Islamic penpal. America has millions of Muslims, but they don’t firebomb
synagogues and beat up Jews, and, if they did, the police wouldn’t turn
a blind eye.

Bush
is right: Skip international court (05/08/02)By Editors of The Seattle Times
President Bush is right to pull out of the treaty for the International
Criminal Court, which is an agreement that would give a foreign court
jurisdiction over acts committed by U.S. soldiers. This is not the International
Court of Justice, or World Court, which has existed since
1945 to settle disputes that governments bring to it. This court is to
have jurisdiction over individuals. It promises to act only if national
courts dont, but it will make the decision to intervene itself,
which is a breach of national sovereignty.

The
New York Times Gloats Over Popes Illness, Awaits His Death
(05/09/02)By J. P. Zmirak at FrontPage Magazine
It fills Keller, and liberal Catholics, with intolerant rage that
a Church is permitted to exist which claims continuity with the
past and divine authority, which refuses to cave in to their opinions,
which dares to dissent from dissent. They will not follow their consciences
 which point the way to the Episcopal church down the road 
and theyre furious that they cannot coerce the consciences of other
Catholics, pull down the Churchs leadership, destroy her internal
consistency and integrity, then smoke a joint in her rubble.

How
Jenin battle became a massacre (05/06/02)By Sharon Sadeh at Media Guardian
In line with the prevalent tradition, the liberal British press
has made an extensive and creative use of figurative language in its reports,
which betrayed both bias and an attempt to elicit emotional response from
the readers which could be translated into increased sales circulation.

The
Big Jenin Lie (05/08/02)By Richard Starr in The Weekly Standard
Precisely a month ago, on April 8, the Palestinian news agency Wafa
was reporting that Israel had committed the massacre of the 21st
century in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. Medical
sources informed Wafa of hundreds of martyrs. This was
a lie, concocted not only for local consumption  to keep the Palestinian
people whipped up in a patriotic, Israel-hating frenzy  but mostly
for export to the West.

The
brutal Afghan winter hits Jenin: Announcing the first British Press Award
For Total Fantasy (05/06/02)By Mark Steyn in The National Post
Nonetheless, in recognition of my London friends spectacularly
inept record since Sept. 11, I am proud to announce the inauguration of
the British Press Award For Total Fantasy. Journalists can enter as many
of their reports as they wish. Cant decide whether that story based
on a Hamas press release is more risible than that dispatch based on the
Radio Taliban lunchtime news? Hey, send us both! Winners will receive
a grand prize of five thousand pounds!!!! However, in keeping with
traditional Fleet Street standards of numerical accuracy, when the cheque
eventually shows up a month later itll be for £8.47.

DUPED!
When journalists fall for fake news (n.d.)At Society of Professional Journalists by Chris Berdik
Media hoaxes are nothing new. Both Ben Franklin and Edgar Allen
Poe wrote satirical yarns and passed them off as news articles. And in
the 19th century, frontier newspapers were filled with tall tales of murder
and mayhem. It seems that as long as theres been mass media in America,
theres been somebody around to monkey with it. Yet there is something
new, as it turns out. In recent years, the publics confidence in
and regard for news media has plummeted.

The
Internationalist (05/03-09/02)Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell in Weekly Literary
Supplement of LA Weekly
Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism and
foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer
to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while soldiering
in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them
all  the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual
underlings of Stalinism.

The
Dinosaurs Are Taking Over (05/13/02)Jane Black interviews Lawrence Lessig at Business Week
Online
Who should control the Internet? If Stanford University law professor
Lawrence Lessig is right, the Internet will soon belong to Hollywood studios,
record labels, and cable operators  corporate giants that he says
are trying to cordon off chunks of the once-open data network.... Lessig
argues that imminent changes to Internet architecture plus court decisions
that restrict the use of intellectual property will co-opt the Net on
behalf of Establishment players  and stifle innovation.

Two
Cheers for Colonialism (05/10/02)By Dinesh DSouza in The Chronicle Review
There is nothing uniquely Western about colonialism.... The West
did not become rich and powerful through colonial oppression.... The reason
the West became so affluent and dominant in the modern era is that it
invented three institutions: science, democracy, and capitalism. All those
institutions are based on universal impulses and aspirations, but those
aspirations were given a unique expression in Western civilization....
The descendants of colonialism are better off than they would be if colonialism
had never happened. 

The
SAT Comes Full Circle: Proposed changes in the Big Test guarantee more
racial special-pleading. (05/06/02)By Heather Mac Donald in City Journal
Racial quota pushers are laying a big trap. For years, they have
argued that the college admissions aptitude test, the SAT, discriminated
against blacks and Hispanics.... Despite its faulty arguments, the race
industry easily persuaded colleges virtually to ignore low SAT grades
when evaluating black and Hispanic students. Now, the race industry is
about to claim its biggest victory of all  dismantling the SAT entirely.

Disassembling
the Catholic Church, Public Education and the U.S. Navy (05/01/02)By Diane Alden at NewsMax
If the leadership in all the institutions dont get a grip,
speak up and out, defend Western civilization and traditional beliefs,
the scandals of the Catholic Church will pale in comparison to the horrors
inflicted by the facilitators and change agents
of the despotic left. Our war on terrorism should include a war on the
ideas and the people who promote moral relativism and the use of trends
like diversity and sensitivity training to produce the new statist man.

Conservatism
can survive despite liberal bias (05/05/02)By Debra J. Saunders in The San Francisco Chronicle
Of course the news media are liberal.... Better to get the facts
with a little bias than no facts at all.... Besides, most reporters 
not columnists, who are paid to be opinionated  try to keep their
ideology under wraps. Most also strive for balance within a story. Its
in the story ideas, however, that the bias really shows.

Biologists
Sought a Treaty; Now They Fault It (05/07/02)In The New York Times by Andrew C. Revkin
A treaty enacted nine years ago to conserve and exploit the diversity
of species on earth is seriously impeding biologists efforts to
catalog and comprehend that same natural bounty, many scientists say....
As a result, biologists say, in many tropical regions it is easier to
cut a forest than to study it.

Fall
and Rise of Christianity (05/04/02)In The Wichita Eagle by Kristin E. Holmes
When scholars talk about the death of Christianity and the rise
of the secular state, Penn State University professor Philip Jenkins just
remembers the south. Not south as in Georgia or Mississippi, but south
as in sections of Latin America, Africa and Asia. There, Christianity
is not only alive but thriving. Christianity is not in free fall,
said Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State.
Its booming and growing very fast in absolute and relative
numbers.

A
Hard Look at Jenin (05/07/02)By Richard Hart Sinnreich in The Washington Post
But before Americans, assaulted by dramatic pictures of Jenin refugee
camps rubble-strewn streets and shattered buildings, draw hasty
conclusions about the Israeli Armys recent operations, we had better
face up to an uncomfortable reality: In an urbanizing world in which enemies
actuated by ideological or religious fervor feel no obligation to conform
to Western norms of military behavior, scenes such as those in Jenin are
likely to increasingly become the rule in war rather than the exception.

Added May 20, 2002

Final
Solution, Phase 2 (George Will)
In Britain the climate created by much of the intelligentsia, including
the elite press, is so toxic that the Sun, a tabloid with more readers
than any other British newspaper, recently was moved to offer a contrapuntal
editorial headlined The Jewish faith is not an evil religion.
Contrary to what Europeans are encouraged to think. And Ron Rosenbaum,
author of the brilliant book Explaining Hitler, acidly notes
the scandal of European leaders supporting the Palestinians right
of return  the right to inundate and eliminate the state created
in response to European genocide  when so many Europeans are
still living in homes stolen from Jews they helped murder. It is
time to face a sickening fact that is much more obvious today than it
was 11 years ago, when Ruth R. Wisse asserted it. In a dark and brilliant
essay in Commentary magazine, she argued that anti-Semitism has proved
to be the most durable and successful ideology of the ideology-besotted
20th century.

Gores
Grossing (Ken Adelman)
When former Vice President Al Gore takes pen to paper  or
computer to email  he seemingly cant avoid engaging in hyperbole.
Thus, it is no surprise the man who wrote that we live in a dysfunctional
civilization in Earth in the Balance would claim in a column to
The New York Times April 21 that the administration that replaced his
was in the pocket of special interests. But as the Danish mathematician,
Bjorn Lomborg, pointed out in The Skeptical Environmentalist, to characterize
as dysfunctional a civilization that has produced more
leisure time, greater security, fewer accidents, more education, more
amenities, higher incomes, fewer starving, more food and healthier and
longer life, is quite simply immoral.

Speaking
Lies to Power: Ralph Nader fudges the truth just like a real politician.
(Matt Welch)
Eighteen hours earlier, I had watched the Nader 2000 crew engage
in a far more flagrant manipulation of the truth, more egregious than
anything else I witnessed during my two months covering the campaign for
the lefty news site WorkingForChange.com. Even before the first preliminary
exit poll data crossed the wires, young staffers, on the orders of campaign
headquarters, were frantically devising multiple formulas to prove
that Nader didn’t cost Gore the election, no matter what the results might
say later. That’s shocking, I told one of the harried idealists
charged with carrying out the deception. The faces around the computer,
for what it’s worth, did not register any surprise. We’ve come to expect
this kind of professional dishonesty from the two major political parties,
which is one of the reasons many of us find them repellent. But coming
from a purity candidate who wants to lecture us on how
to tell the truth, it suggests a certain self-delusion. It’s one
thing to display the schizophrenia inherent in trying to cobble together
a coalition of disaffected lifelong Democrats and party-hating anti-globalization
activists. It’s quite another to speak truth to power by fudging
it.

Careers
are making women miserable (London Telegraph)
Women have become unhappier as a result of concentrating more on
their careers than the family role they once fulfilled, an academic claims
in a new book. Prof James Tooley believes the feminist revolution of the
1960s and 1970s brought about huge changes in attitudes which have not
be conducive to motherhood. In his book, The Miseducation of Women, published
next month, he suggests many professional woman would have been more contented
by staying at home and bringing up children. He draws comparisons with
the film character Bridget Jones, a love-hungry young woman in publishing
who becomes a television presenter and craves a stable relationship rather
than being left a singleton. Prof Tooley, professor of education
policy at Newcastle University, considers that the role of housewife has
been desperately undervalued in society. He argues that schools
should allow girls to concentrate on the arts and domestic science rather
than being pushed towards subjects such as engineering and computer science
in an attempt at sexual equality.

Its
the End of the Modern Age (John Lukacs)
For a long time, I have been convinced that we in the West are living
near the end of an entire age, the age that began about 500 years ago.
I knew, at a very early age, that the West was better than
the East  especially better than Russia and Communism.
I had read Spengler: But I believed that the Anglo-American victory over
the Third Reich (and over Japan) was, at least in some ways, a refutation
of the categorical German proposition of the inevitable and imminent Decline
of the West. However  Churchills and Roosevelts victory
had to be shared with Stalin. The result, after 1945, was my early decision
to flee from a not yet wholly Sovietized Hungary to the United States,
at the age of 22. And 20-odd years later, at the age of 45, I was convinced
that the entire Modern Age was crumbling fast. But there is a duality
in every human life, in every human character. I am neither a cynic nor
a categorical pessimist. Twelve years ago, I wrote: Because of the
goodness of God I have had a happy unhappy life, which is preferable to
an unhappy happy one. I wrote, too: So living during the decline
of the West  and being much aware of it  is not at all that
hopeless and terrible. But during these past 10 years (not fin de
siècle: fin dune ère), my conviction hardened further, into an unquestioning
belief not only that the entire age, and the civilization to which I have
belonged, are passing but that we are living through  if not already
beyond  its very end. I am writing about the so-called Modern Age.

Gun
Control Misfires in Europe (John Lott)
Sixteen people were killed during Fridays school shooting
in Germany. This follows the killing of 14 regional legislators in Zug,
a Swiss canton, last September, and the massacre of eight city council
members in a Paris suburb last month. The three worst public shootings
in the Western world during the past year all occurred in Europe, whose
gun laws are exactly what gun-control advocates want the U.S. to adopt.
Indeed, all three occurred in gun-free safe zones. Germans
who wish to get hold of a hunting rifle must undergo checks that can last
a year, while those wanting a gun for sport must be a member of a club
and obtain a license from the police. The French must apply for gun permits,
which are granted only after an exhaustive background and medical record
check and demonstrated need, with permits only valid for three years.
Even Switzerlands once famously liberal laws have become tighter.
Swiss federal law now limits gun permits to only those who can demonstrate
in advance a need for a weapon to protect themselves or others against
a precisely specified danger. The problem with such laws is that they
take away guns from law-abiding citizens, while would-be criminals ignore
them, leaving potential victims defenseless. The U.S. has shown that making
guns more available is actually a better formula for law and order.

The
end of poverty? (Christian Science Monitor)
John Edmunds has seen the future – and its wealthy. This will
be news to many – certainly to all those antiglobalization protesters
who now force the worlds economic leaders into retreat behind concrete
wherever they gather. And many people are used to thinking of the developing
world only in terms of dire, and worsening, poverty. But Dr. Edmunds,
a professor at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., is adamant. The
economic problem is now solved, he says. For thousands of
years, mankind struggled to achieve freedom from poverty. The solution
is now here and is rapidly transforming everyones economic possibilities
everywhere. It may be true that global wealth creation continues
apace. But some warn that the rich are getting richer, and the poor poorer,
at rates that surprise even pessimists. A recent World Bank study, for
instance, found the gap between rich and poor absolutely huge and
far higher than conventional measures indicate. Yet statistics also
show millions escaping poverty.... And someone out there is buying all
those cellphones and TVs and computers being sold in the developing world.

Great
Basin Mammals (co2science.org)
The results of this study and those of several others (Grayson,
2000; Grayson and Madson, 2000; Fleishman et al., 2001) stand in stark
contrast to the doom-and-gloom predictions of climate alarmists, who incessantly
claim that global warming will lead to a mass extinction of species nearly
everywhere on earth because, as they say, plants and animals will not
be able to migrate fast enough to keep up with the climatic zones to which
they are currently most accustomed, or alternatively, they will literally
run out of places to run when the migration is upward as opposed
to poleward. As simple-sounding as that fearsome hypothesis is, more complex
studies, such as the one reviewed here, indicate it is simply wrong, because
plants and animals are simply not the simpletons climate alarmists make
them out to be, as they possess a wide array of strategies for coping
with environmental change and recolonizing former territories after having
once been forced out of them.

Water
Level History of the U.S. Great Lakes (co2science.org)
Climate alarmists worry  or claim they worry  that greenhouse-induced
warming will dramatically lower the water levels of the Great Lakes. However,
over what they claim to be the century that has exhibited the greatest
warming of the entire past millennium, there has been no net change in
the water level of any of the Great Lakes. In addition, over the past
two decades of what they typically refer to as unprecedented warming,
the four lakes have exhibited their greatest stability and highest water
levels of the past century. These observations fly in the face of all
the climate alarmists horror stories, suggesting that either the
consequences they predict to follow on the heels of global warming are
wrong or their global temperature history of the past millennium is wrong...
or both are wrong. Based on their poor track record in representing reality,
we lean towards the latter alternative.

Study:
Science Literacy Poor in US (Yahoo! News)
Few Americans understand the scientific process and many believe
in mysterious psychic powers and may be quick to accept phony science
reports, according to a national survey. The survey, part of the National
Science Foundation (news - web sites)s biennial report on the state
of science understanding, research, education and investment, found that
the belief in pseudoscience is common in America. The study
found that science literacy has improved only slightly since the previous
survey and that 70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific
process. America continues to lead the world, the study found, in scientific
investment, in research and development and in technology advances. But
it found weakness in some levels of scientific education and noted that
the U.S. continues to depend heavily on foreign-born scientists and now
faces increased competition from steadily improving scientific enterprises
abroad. In the survey of American attitudes toward science, the study
found that doctors and scientists were the most respected of the professions,
but it also found that belief in pseudoscience is relatively widespread
and growing.

Limits
(Peter Beinart)
At first glance, the dynamics of the Church pedophilia cover-up
feel familiar: Mid-level officials abused their authority; their superiors,
fearing embarrassment, protected them, immeasurably compounding the offense;
those superiors responded to initial press reports by stonewalling and
denigrating the accusers; but then, when the revelations grew overwhelming,
they belatedly opted for full disclosure and public apologies. Presented
with this apparently familiar script, the commentariat has settled into
its familiar role. As with Enron, Gary Condit, and Monica Lewinsky, it
has focused on two main questions: Who should take the blame?
and What lesson is to be drawn? The problem in the Church
pedophilia scandal is that the opinion industry cant answer either
of those questions because, in a deep sense, they are none of its business.
The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald have
called on Bernard Cardinal Law to resign. But you cant declare someone
unfit for their post without having an opinion about the requirements
of the post. And you cant have an opinion about the requirements
of the post without having an opinion about the mission of the institution
as a whole. Newspapers can call on a politician to resign because they
have legitimate opinions about the purpose of the government in which
he or she serves. They can demand that a cardinal who shields pedophile
priests go to jail because they have legitimate opinions about criminal
justice. But they cant legitimately call on a cardinal to resign
because they cant have a legitimate opinion about the purpose of
the Catholic Church. You cant weigh Laws cover-up of pedophilia
against his work serving the poor, or opposing abortion, or bestowing
the sacraments, or espousing the gospel, without making a judgment about
the relative value of those endeavors, and that judgment is inescapably
theological. It is a judgment about the best way to incarnate the revelation
of Jesus Christ  and thats not a judgment for The Boston
Globe.

Scientists
Cautious on Report of Cancer From Starchy Foods (NYT)
Many experts say that a rising furor over a new report that many
starchy foods, including breads, cereals and French fries, are laced with
a chemical that could cause cancer is overblown. The chemical is acrylamide,
which, Swedish scientists reported last week, is produced when certain
carbohydrates are baked or fried at high temperatures. The scientists
have not published a paper on their small study. Instead, they made their
announcement at a news conference last week. Shortly afterward, the World
Health Organization announced it would organize an expert consultation
as soon as possible to determine the full extent of the public health
risk from acrylamide in food. But many experts said yesterday that
it made no sense to be alarmed over unpublished data on a chemical that
was very unlikely to have a measurable impact on cancer rates. Its
just dumb, dumb, dumb, Dr. Stephen Safe, a professor of toxicology
at Texas A&M University. There are carcinogens in everything you
eat. Maybe theyll just ban food. Others agreed.

Tales
of the Tyrant (Mark Bowden)
Fresh food is flown in for him twice a week — lobster, shrimp, and
fish, lots of lean meat, plenty of dairy products. The shipments are sent
first to his nuclear scientists, who x-ray them and test them for radiation
and poison. The food is then prepared for him by European-trained chefs,
who work under the supervision of al Himaya, Saddams personal bodyguards.
Each of his more than twenty palaces is fully staffed, and three meals
a day are cooked for him at every one; security demands that palaces from
which he is absent perform an elaborate pantomime each day, as if he were
in residence. Saddam tries to regulate his diet, allotting servings and
portions the way he counts out the laps in his pools. For a big man he
usually eats little, picking at his meals, often leaving half the food
on his plate. Sometimes he eats dinner at restaurants in Baghdad, and
when he does, his security staff invades the kitchen, demanding that the
pots and pans, dishware, and utensils be well scrubbed, but otherwise
interfering little. Saddam appreciates the culinary arts. He prefers fish
to meat, and eats a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables. He likes wine
with his meals, though he is hardly an oenophile; his wine of choice is
Mateus rosé. But even though he indulges only in moderation, he is careful
not to let anyone outside his most trusted circle of family and aides
see him drinking. Alcohol is forbidden by Islam, and in public Saddam
is a dutiful son of the faith.

The
Hidden Victims (Thomas Friedman)
Progressive Arab states, like Jordan, Morocco and Bahrain, which
want to build their legitimacy not on how they confront Israel but on
how well they prepare their people for the future, are being impeded.
And retrograde Arab regimes, like Syria, Saudi Arabia or Iraq, can now
feed their people more excuses why not to reform. The Palestinians have
been experts at seducing the Arab world into postponing its future until
all the emotive issues of Palestine are resolved. Three generations of
Arabs have already paid dearly for only being allowed to ask one question:
Who rules Palestine? — not, How are we educating our young or what kind
of democracy or economy should we have? It would be a tragedy if a fourth
generation suffered the same fate.

A
Field of Nightmares (Jessica Gavora)
Feminists call the struggle for proportionality under Title IX the
pursuit of “gender equity.” The Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF) is perhaps
the strongest advocate of Title IX and “gender equity” in sports, having
as its mission to “increase and enhance sports and fitness opportunities
for all girls and women.” Founded by tennis player Billie Jean King in
1974 in the after-glow of her victory over Bobby Riggs in the “Battle
of the Sexes,” the WSF is the most powerful advocacy group for female
athletes in the country. Like most women’s groups, it has benefited from
friendly press coverage.... But behind the appealing image of strong female
athleticism that is the group’s public face, the Women’s Sports Foundation
pursues a relentlessly political agenda: to turn the grant of opportunity
for women guaranteed under Title IX into a grant of preference. Under
the leadership of its street-fighting executive director, Donna Lopiano,
a former All-American softball player and the former women’s athletic
director at the University of Texas, the WSF has done more than any other
group to convince colleges and universities that compliance with Title
IX means manipulating the numbers of male and female athletes.

Added May 13, 2002

Cardinal
Coverup (New Times LA)
On the day after child-molesting Boston priest John Geoghan was
sentenced to prison in late February, marking an incremental low in the
sex scandal afflicting the Roman Catholic Church, Los Angeles Cardinal
Roger M. Mahony launched a remarkable public-relations campaign. It began
subtly, with a pastoral letter published in The Tidings, the archdioceses
official newspaper. The 65-year-old cardinal pledged to do all that
is humanly possible to prevent sexual abuse in the L.A. Archdiocese,
the nations largest. He set forth a zero tolerance policy for priests
who abuse children.... A few days later  even as he abruptly dismissed
a few sex-abusing priests who had enjoyed his favor for years despite
his knowledge that they were molesters, and then stonewalled law enforcement
about who they were  Mahony quickly sought to establish himself
as a leading voice in dealing with the widening scandal. He ordered that
a brochure on the problem of sex abuse be distributed to all parishes
and schools within the sprawling L.A. Archdiocese, encompassing Los Angeles,
Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. And he unveiled a new sexual-abuse
hotline ostensibly aimed at enabling abuse victims to blow the whistle
on errant priests. The cardinals press spokesman described these
efforts in glowing terms. In view of the Boston scandal, Tod Tamberg,
his spokesman, said the cardinal thought the time had come to let the
faithful know that we have comprehensive policies on sex abuse,
that we follow them carefully and review them regularly. The implicit
message: Other Catholic hierarchs might appear flat-footed in the face
of the worst scandal to rock the church in centuries, but Los Angeles
Mahony was a leader who was actually doing something. Yet in his pell-mell
rush to be seen as the cardinal with a plan, all the while playing a gullible
local mainstream press like a harp in diverting attention from his own
dismal record of protecting pedo-priests, Mahonys actions amounted
to little more than a public-relations snow job. His image as a reformer
took another beating this week with the disclosure that his protecting
of accused pedophiles has extended even to the new Our Lady of the Angels
Cathedral residential suites, with abuse claims against Father Carl Sutphin,
who until recently was associate pastor there.... In fact, most of his
publicly announced ideas for dealing with the sex-abuse crisis, including
those he unveiled amid much fanfare before jetting off to Rome along with
other American cardinals to meet with the pope this month, werent
Mahonys at all. They had been forced on him, kicking and screaming,
as it were, last August as conditions for settling a potentially explosive
sex-abuse case involving the former principal of a prominent Catholic
high school in Orange County, Monsignor Michael Harris. Barely a month
before he would have been forced to testify at the Harris trial, Mahony
authorized the Los Angeles Archdiocese to pay victim Ryan DiMaria $5.2
million  the largest such settlement ever for a single victim in
a Catholic sex-abuse case.

Bishops,
media views of zero tolerance create gap in perceptions (CNS)
U.S. church leaders left a Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse
saying they felt encouraged to take new steps to curb such abuse and rein
in offenders. But they arrived home in the United States to a largely
negative reaction and headlines that read: Cardinals Confront Sex
Abuse and Come Up Short, and Vatican Summit Confounds, Angers.
What happened? Why such a gulf between perceptions? One big reason was
confusion over the term zero tolerance, especially in light
of a final communique by summit participants. Going into the meeting,
zero tolerance was a phrase used by bishops and dioceses to
describe the policy of removing from positions of ministry any priest
who has abused minors or who is facing a credible accusation. In effect,
the priest remains a priest, but he is out of a church job. The summit
communique introduced a new, even stronger potential punishment that may
be designed for priest-offenders: a quick procedure of forced laicization.
That means an abusive priest would not only be out of a job, he would
no longer be a priest. Unfortunately, many in the media never understood
the distinction.

What
Were Fighting For: We hold these truths to be self-evident. Lets
start acting like it. (Brendan Miniter)
Now its time for Western culture to stand up again. Worries
about imperialism, especially cultural imperialism, should be cast off.
Global free trade isnt imperialistic; its the spread of a
natural right, economic freedom. Demanding that a country respect its
peoples basic rights isnt imperialistic, and neither is standing
for an unfettered media. No one wants to bring back colonial empires.
All cannot remain quiet on the Western front. The West, not just America,
is locked in a struggle with forces that question its foundation. Osama
bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and many others reject the fundamental ideals
of Western culture: individual sovereignty, freedom of conscience, free
interaction among men and the right to the fruits of ones own labor.
They reject the Western intellectual framework that has permitted scientific,
political and economic freedom and given the world the fruits of unparalleled
creativity. These thugs hate Western success and religious plurality.
Like Lenin buying rope from capitalists, the only Western product they
seem to like is weaponry. The medias historical ignorance helps
undermine Western confidence. Rarely do we see reports explaining how
the West benefited from Judeo-Christian thought. We are told Americas
Founding Founders were deists if not atheists. Yet studying the period
youll find countless references to God and prayers of asking Gods
guidance. John Adams once said the intellectual framework for rebellion
was laid in the churches years before it became a political struggle.
That makes sense, for America is founded on the idea that man is endowed
by his Creator with the right to be free.

Blind
Spot (Randall Kennedy)
The key argument in favor of racial profiling, essentially, is that
taking race into account enables the authorities to screen carefully and
at less expense those sectors of the population that are more likely than
others to contain the criminals for whom officials are searching.... Some
commentators embrace this position as if it were unassailable, but under
U.S. law racial discrimination backed by state power is presumptively
illicit. This means that supporters of racial profiling carry a heavy
burden of persuasion.... Stressing that racial profiling generates clear
harm (for example, the fear, resentment, and alienation felt by innocent
people in the profiled group), opponents of racial profiling sensibly
question whether compromising our hard-earned principle of anti-discrimination
is worth merely speculative gains in overall security. A notable feature
of this conflict is that champions of each position frequently embrace
rhetoric, attitudes, and value systems that are completely at odds with
those they adopt when confronting another controversial instance of racial
discrimination  namely, affirmative action. Vocal supporters of
racial profiling who trumpet the urgency of communal needs when discussing
law enforcement all of a sudden become fanatical individualists when condemning
affirmative action in college admissions and the labor market. Supporters
of profiling, who are willing to impose what amounts to a racial tax on
profiled groups, denounce as betrayals of color blindness
programs that require racial diversity. A similar turnabout can be seen
on the part of many of those who support affirmative action. Impatient
with talk of communal needs in assessing racial profiling, they very often
have no difficulty with subordinating the interests of individual white
candidates to the purported good of the whole. Opposed to race consciousness
in policing, they demand race consciousness in deciding whom to admit
to college or select for a job.

A
War of Resolve: American kowtowing to moderate Arabs may embolden
bin Laden. (Bernard Lewis)
It was the shock of Americas rapid and sharp reaction that
made bin Laden blink. After the U.S.s initial response, he halted
his campaign and adopted a more cautious attitude. But some recent American
actions and utterances may bring a reconsideration of this judgement and
the halt to which it gave rise. Our anxious pleading with the fragile
and frightened regimes of the region to join  or at least to tolerate
 a campaign against terrorism and its sponsors has put the U.S.
in a corner where it seems to be asking permission for actions that are
its own prerogative to take. Likewise, the exemptions accorded to some
terrorist leaders, movements and actions not immediately directed against
us have undermined the strong moral position which must be the foundation
of our global war on terrorism. The submission to being scolded and slighted,
as Secretary of State Colin Powell did in his recent meeting with the
king of Morocco, and his failure to meet with the president of Egypt,
make the U.S. seem it is reverting to bad habits. That only further contributes
to a perceived posture of irresolution and uncertainty on the part of
the U.S. administration.

Radical
Islam gains adherents abroad (Stephen Handelman)
But even where it succeeded in gaining a political foothold, radical
Islam exposed itself as incoherent and unsatisfying to those whom it most
needed to attract. Islamists incendiary rhetoric and uncompromising
approach to statecraft alienated the very middle classes that earlier
sympathized with their critique of corrupt elites, wrote Ray Takeyh
of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. So what does their failure
have to do with Europe and the West? The answer is chillingly simple:
Unable to win political traction at home, radical Islam has found its
most passionate new adherents in Muslim communities abroad. At least 12
million Muslims  perhaps as many as 22 million  live in Europe
today. The targets of economic discrimination and prejudice themselves,
many can be easily swayed to violence in the pursuit of a political agenda
set elsewhere. That governments in the Muslim world are aware of this
is indisputable. Also indisputable is the fact that the money and logistics
support channelled to these overseas groups by some of those governments
deflects the still-genuine threat posed by Islamic alternatives at home.

Intellectuals
are failing the West (Paul Mulshine)
With a few prominent exceptions, such as Johns Hopkins University
professor Fouad Ajami, intellectuals have been reluctant to criticize
the Muslim worlds tilt toward totalitarianism. And that Muslim world
will continue to be a threat to the West as long as so many fanatics cling
to the illusion that a government is justified in ignoring basic rights
as long as it claims to be religiously inspired. Even the massacre
of 3,000 innocent people has not alerted people to whats going on,
Warraq said of the events of Sept. 11. I noticed in England, where
I have some liberal friends, that many of the intellectuals took it that
this was all because of American foreign policy. Its really, really
dangerous to go along that line of thought. The problem is much
deeper than that, according to Warraq. The leaders of the Islamist movement
see themselves as on the verge of another great expansion like the one
that occurred in the Middle Ages. And the mushiness of the multiculturalists
fuels their ambitions.... The multiculturalists maintain that different
cultures can have different values, even if those values infringe upon
the basic rights of the individual. The opposite view, best stated by
Thomas Jefferson back when it was European kings who were claiming to
rule in the name of God, is that rights are unalienable. Any government
that tramples on them is illegitimate. Warraq says Western intellectuals
should insist that Muslim governments observe individual rights.

Excusing
child abuse (Matt Kaufman)
There are some things whose evil should be so obvious that no debate
is necessary. We wouldn’t be a better society if we sat down for calm,
dispassionate discussions of the merits of, say, rape. (Sure,
one side would argue, women say no means no,
but some of them don’t really mean it.) The same is true
of sex with children. That’s why it’s important that we not only reject
pedophilia, but reject it vehemently, with undisguised disgust. We modern
folk hesitate to display that sort of disgust, for fear we’ll be considered
judgmental. But we’d better recognize something: If the pro-pedophilia
crowd can simply get recognized as a legitimate side in a debate — sharing
podiums with opponents, haggling over the fine points of scientific studies,
gradually accustoming people to the idea that some types of pedophilia
aren’t really so bad — then they’re well on their way to achieving their
goal. As Newshouse News Service writer Mark O’Keefe summarizes their view,
it may be only a matter of time before modern society accepts adult-child
sex, just as it has learned to accept premarital sex and homosexual sex.
That’s a sobering comparison for anyone who complacently assumes society
will never reach the point of tolerating pedophilia. It’s also an important
reminder of where the roots of the threat really lie.

Gunmen
stole gold, crucifixes, escaped monks report (Jerusalem Post)
Three Armenian monks, who had been held hostage by the Palestinian
gunmen inside the Bethlehems Church of the Nativity, managed to
flee the church area via a side gate yesterday morning. They immediately
thanked the soldiers for rescuing them. They told army officers the gunmen
had stolen gold and other property, including crucifixes and prayer books,
and had caused damage. The three elderly monks were assisted by soldiers.
One of them held a white cloth banner with the words Please help.
One of the monks, Narkiss Korasian, later told reporters: They stole
everything, they opened the doors one by one and stole everything... they
stole our prayer books and four crosses... they didnt leave anything.
Thank you for your help, we will never forget it.

In
Dealing With Abusive Priests, Bishops Stood Along Wide Spectrum (NYT)
While some American bishops transferred predator priests from parish
to parish, the leader of one diocese, Bishop Donald W. Wuerl of Pittsburgh,
battled for seven years to remove a sexually abusive priest from the ministry.
Bishop Wuerl suspended the priest, the Rev. Anthony Cipolla, in 1988 after
a former altar boy sued him for damages and at least one other victim
stepped forward. And when Father Cipolla persuaded the Vaticans
highest tribunal to reinstate him, Bishop Wuerl traveled to Rome with
suitcases full of papers to document the priests sex crimes. The
Vatican reversed course in 1995, upholding the bishops sanctions
and vindicating what he describes as his effort to protect the safety
of his flock. You have to assure your people that their needs are
first, he said in an interview last week. Bishop Wuerl stands on
one end of a broad spectrum of how Catholic leaders have responded to
the sexual abuse crisis in the church. While he and some other bishops
in the nations 194 dioceses have sought in various ways to prevent
abuse and to hold pedophiles accountable, others have seemed more concerned
with protecting the churchs name and its bank accounts, church leaders
and religious scholars said in interviews.... In an interview on Thursday
at his downtown Pittsburgh chancery, Bishop Wuerl said that shortly after
assuming leadership of the diocese in 1988, he paid a visit to the shattered
family of two brothers who had been abused by priests. The meeting had
a profound effect on him, he said. You cannot visit with someone
who has been abused without coming away with deepened resolve that this
should never happen again, he said. That same year, he removed Father
Cipolla as a chaplain at a Catholic home for handicapped children, after
Timothy A. Bendig, a Pittsburgh paramedic, accused the priest of having
repeatedly abused him when he was an altar boy earlier in the 1980s.
Mr. Bendig, the second Pittsburgh Catholic to step forward with accusations
against Father Cipolla, sued the Diocese of Pittsburgh for damages, eventually
obtaining a settlement. Father Cipolla appealed his removal all the way
to the Vaticans highest court, the Signatura, which in 1993 ordered
that he be reinstated, on the ground that Bishop Wuerl had violated his
rights under canon law. But in 1995, after the bishop went to Rome to
offer details of the priests behavior, the court reversed itself.
Bishop Wuerl took a brave stand in my case, Mr. Bendig said
in an interview. He just insisted, This man should not be
a priest.

Well,
oil be ... its our new pal, Russia (Bill Virgin)
So we have finally soured on our friends of convenience, the Saudis.
This is hardly surprising. After all, if you expect us to keep your country
from being annexed by Saddam as the 19th or 20th province of Iraq but
you treat our troops like your subjects, all the while secretly encouraging
attacks on us and our allies, even we Americans eventually catch on. But
this is all right, because we believe we have found a new best friend
 the Russians. An affiliation with the Russians has several attractions.
It provides an answer and an alternative to the reason weve put
up with the Saudis this long  oil. Having Russia as a major supplier
would allow us to tell the Saudis to literally and figuratively go pound
sand. And being business and political partners with Russia puts on our
side a nation that, while smaller than in the Soviet Union era, is still
a significant force (we just know weve got those nukes around
here somewhere).

Jewish
Chiefs: Anti-Semitism Grows (Yahoo! News)
World Jewish leaders warned Tuesday that the level of anti-Semitic
attacks in Europe is the worst since World War II. The executive committee
of the World Jewish Congress demanded better protection by authorities.
Secretary-general Avi Beker said 360 anti-Semitic incidents in France
over the past two weeks heralded worse to come for Jewish communities
in Europe. There is today an anxiety on the part of Jews when they
go to the religious centers, they go to their social centers, when they
send their children to school, Beker said on the last day of a two-day
emergency meeting of the umbrella group that represents Jewish groups
from about 80 countries. This is quite shameful for Europe.
Synagogues, Jewish schools and cemeteries have been targeted in attacks
in several European nations in recent weeks, coinciding with Israels
major offensive in Palestinian cities in the West Bank. Suspects in many
of the attacks are Arab youths of North African origin.

U.S.
to help U.N. redefine families (WT)
The Bush administration has joined European delegates to an upcoming
U.N. summit on children in moving to recognize families in various
forms, including unmarried cohabiting couples and homosexual partners.
A coalition of Catholic and Muslim countries has formed to block the change
to the traditional U.N. definition of the family  married heterosexual
parents and children  at the General Assemblys Special Session
on Children from May 8 to May 10. A senior official at the U.S. Mission
to the United Nations in New York said the U.S. Mission and the State
Department are backing the delegates from Switzerland and the European
Union in their efforts because so many children today are brought up by
single parents. Informal negotiations resume today in New York on a final
document for the summit. The U.S. official spoke anonymously, saying he
did not want to be hung out to dry for explaining the administrations
position. He said the United States supports the proposal to recognize
families in various forms because obviously we feel
this more reflects the families of today, which are headed by single parents
and extended families. Customarily, U.N. members are obliged to
conform their national laws to the bodys declarations, and critics
have said that the European-backed changes would make such proposals as
homosexual marriage and domestic-partner benefits an internationally
recognized right.

Added May 6, 2002

PAT
Answers: Its time to stop taking the likes of Paul Ehrlich seriously.
(Pete Du Pont)
So how did the leading environmentalists get it so wrong in the
1970s? Perhaps the most important reason was a profound misunderstanding
of the way the world works. The root of the misconception was Paul Ehrlich
and John Holdens famous equation: I = PAT. The negative Impact of
humans on the environment, they said, is the product of Population times
Affluence times Technology. A bigger population was a bad thing because
people consume resources and need houses and roads and so forth. More
affluence was bad too as it allowed greater capita consumption of resources,
and that must be multiplied by the negative impact of the technology necessary
to produce the resources consumed.... What was missing in this view was
the greatest resource of all  the human mind and its ability to
develop efficient technologies that would improve the quality of life.
Missing was the understanding that more electricity for more operating
rooms to do more heart surgery was a good thing. More fertilizer meant
less acreage had to be tilled, thus saving  and actually expanding
 the forests. More production of goods meant more jobs, more opportunity
and more national income to devote to environmental improvement. In short,
I = PAT posited not even a zero-sum society (your gain is my loss), but
a negative-sum society (your gain is always the worlds loss). It
was a cost-benefit analysis in which there was only cost, never benefit.
And it was dead wrong.

Religious
Freedom in Jeopardy? (Susanna Cornett)
The protection religious groups have now is because of our Constitution
 the protection of religious freedom  and because it is generally
felt even among non-believers that religion on the whole benefits society,
if for no other reason than that it is an expression of our freedom of
speech and pursuit of happiness. What if, as society changes, the religious
practices become more and more out of step with it? I think the response
to what we see in Afghanistan is illustrative. When the media speak about
the oppression of women in Afghanistan, using burkas as a symbol of it,
they don’t separate belief from practice. The problem, as I see it, is
not that women wear burkas, but that the ones who don’t believe it necessary
are forced to do so. Our society, however, can’t quite conceive of women
choosing to live within the restrictions imposed by some of the stricter
Muslim teachings, so we assume that any woman who is living that way is
doing so through force or ignorance. Perhaps that is true in some cases,
but not all. And if we insist that their religious freedoms must stay
within certain boundaries, then how can we preserve the full range of
our own? I’m not advocating, in the Muslim instance, that all manifestations
of Islam should be allowed. Murder of the innocent is always wrong, and
we have a responsibility to stop it. And I’m also not saying that the
teachings of Islam are correct; I don’t believe that’s true. But how we
as a society respond to their religious choices, and how those of us who
are religious respond to evil when we find it in our midst, will shape
the tomorrow for religious freedom in the United States. Losing tax-exempt
status wouldn’t end religious freedom in this country, but it would move
us further down that road, and it’s not a road with easy return. Just
as our right to privacy is in jeopardy from laws passed ostensibly to
give us greater homeland security, so our religious freedoms could suffer
from laws passed to prevent ecclesiastical abuse. I think we stand at
a crossroad; how we call the Catholic Church hierarchy to account for
lies, abuse and years of protecting self at the cost of the innocence
of dozens of young men and women will help determine on which path we
set our feet.

The
Hard Way: Its easier to fight than to pray. So lets pray.
(Peggy Noonan)
So what are we to do? I was daydreaming about all this as I walked
in my neighborhood on Pierrepont Street yesterday, and I found myself
staring at a message someone had drawn onto newly poured concrete: Smile.
Today is what you have. It struck me, naturally, as sentimental
street art. And then I thought no, its both spiritual  This
is the day the Lord made / let us rejoice and be glad in it, wrote
the Psalmist  and fatalistic.... It is easier to fight than to pray.
In fact its much easier to fight than to pray. Its one of
the reasons we do more of the former than the latter. And fighting is
hard. But its not the hardest thing of all the things we could do.
The hardest thing is this: I have been reading about Karol Wojtyla during
World War II, long before he became Pope John Paul II. Mr. Wojtyla was
in his late teens when the war started, and after the Nazis invaded Poland
he worked manual labor, on the freezing overnight shift at a factory,
outdoors, breaking and carrying rocks.... He helped friends in the Resistance,
but he did not join them. Why? Because, as he told a friend, the only
resistance that would work was asking Gods help. The only
thing that will be effective is prayer. .... Prayer is the hardest
thing. And no one congratulates you for doing it because no one knows
youre doing it, and if things turn out well they likely wont
thank God in any case. But I have a feeling that the hardest thing is
what we all better be doing now, and that its not only the best
answer but the only one.

On
Jew-hatred in Europe (Oriana Fallaci)
I find it shameful that in part through the fault of the left 
or rather, primarily through the fault of the left (think of the left
that inaugurates its congresses applauding the representative of the PLO
leader in Italy of the Palestinians who want the destruction of Israel)
 Jews in Italian cities are once again afraid. And in French cities
and Dutch cities and Danish cities and German cities, it is the same.
I find it shameful that Jews tremble at the passage of the scoundrels
dressed like suicide bombers just as they trembled during Krystallnacht,
the night in which Hitler gave free rein to the Hunt of the Jews. I find
it shameful that in obedience to the stupid, vile, dishonest, and for
them extremely advantageous fashion of Political Correctness the usual
opportunists  or better the usual parasites  exploit the word
Peace. That in the name of the word Peace, by now more debauched than
the words Love and Humanity, they absolve one side alone of its hate and
bestiality. That in the name of a pacifism (read conformism) delegated
to the singing crickets and buffoons who used to lick Pol Pot’s feet they
incite people who are confused or ingenuous or intimidated. Trick them,
corrupt them, carry them back a half century to the time of the yellow
star on the coat. These charlatans who care about the Palestinans as much
as I care about the charlatans. That is not at all.

Return
of the Guy (Charlotte Allen)
In the furnaces of September 11, there was suddenly forged a new
social trend: the return of the guy. (Remember that it was four guys who
rushed the terrorists who commandeered United Airlines Flight 93, wrenching
it to the ground near Pittsburgh.) This trend was continued in the war
against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. No one, even NOW, was heard
to gripe that there were no women reported among the U.S. Special Forces
troops fighting hand to hand with militant supporters of Osama bin Laden
during the days after the Taliban fled Kabul. For the first time
in a long time, American heroes are not movie actors or sports figures
or celebrity scandal-survivors, political commentator Andrew Sullivan
wrote in the Sunday Times of London. They are cops
and firemen and special forces soldiers. Their sex is male, and
they do the kind of work that calls on specifically male attributes and
virtues: physical strength, tough fatherly leadership (think of Rudolph
Giuliani), brotherly bonding into fighting units, courage, and blunt compassion.
Welcome back, guys.

The
Big Lie and the Big Lawsuit (Lawrence Henry)
The world has changed, and its a meaner place. Little children
who once would have gathered around a pipe smoker to say, That smells
good and Daddy, why dont you smoke a pipe? now
point fingers and say That stinks! and Youre gonna
die! Carrie Nation and her saloon-busting hatchet are totems of
historical ridicule today. But Carrie Nations heirs in the anti-smoking
movement have tapped into all the same wretched excesses of American culture
 bluenosery, totalitarianism, and vandalism. There is a difference,
of course. Todays Carrie Nations have used thirty years of anti-tobacco
jihadery to practice the sinister modern techniques of the Big Lie and
the Big Lawsuit. Along the way, theyve corrupted science, destroyed
objective journalism, and made the truth nothing more than a commodity.
Theyve demonized tens of millions of people and turned tens of millions
more into preening, self-righteous jerks. And of course theyre not
done. Having practiced and perfected their techniques, theyre now
casting around for new targets. Food looms as the most likely. But there
are others, lots of others. I would say that George Orwell himself would
be challenged to describe it all. But of course he wouldnt.

Their
way of life isnt ours (Paul Mulshine)
The problem, if my readings and discussions with American Muslim
political activists are any indication, is that their goals and ours seem
to be mutually exclusive. In our phone conversation, Obeidallah made a
point of insisting that Muslims in America want to live Islam as what
he termed a way of life. I asked him what he meant by that.
Living Islam as a way of life means the leader is actually an Islamist,
he said. It means you must govern by the rules of the Koran and
the rules of the Prophet Mohammed. He is not alone in that view.
When I interviewed another leader of New Jerseys Muslim community,
Yasir El-Menshawy, the president of the New Jersey Council of Mosques
and Islamic Organizations, he also insisted that the Muslim idea of a
religious state is superior to the American idea of a secular state. Muslims
tend to want to have a more complete implementation of Islam running the
affairs of the state, El-Menshawy told me. When I insisted that
the American system of religious freedom is clearly a better one, he responded,
I dont agree the U.S. system is clearly a better system.

I
do have a few things to say now (Jon Carroll)
Listen to me. It doesnt matter whos right. Let me say
that again: Right now, it doesnt matter whos right. Stop with
the screeds. It doesnt matter whos right. Peace making requires
more courage than war making. Peace making require more intelligence than
war making. Peace making requires patience, time, serenity and an open
mind. I know about the numerous failures of peace making in the Mideast.
But if we are to be humans, hope is always an obligation. We must always
start again. We have just lived through a century of mass deaths, deaths
in unimaginable numbers. Six million Jews killed by Nazis, at least 8.5
million people killed by Stalin, 800,000 Armenians murdered by Turks;
100,000 Kurds murdered by Saddam Hussein. One million Cambodians killed
by the Khmer Rouge; 800,000 Tutsis of Rwanda murdered by Hutus in 100
days. Do you know whether the Tutsis or the Hutus had a better claim to
their disputed lands? Are you interested in the validity of the political
claims made by the Armenians? The last two times we entered a world war,
only a few people believed that it would happen. Generals on both sides
of World War I thought it would last six months. At the beginning of World
War II, the British called it the phony war.

The
priceless gift of the priesthood (Fr. William Leahy)
To be a priest requires living a life marked by faith, integrity,
and service, and it offers the possibility for doing so much good and
for helping make God more present in our world. One day this winter I
visited the parents of a recent graduate of Boston College whose son,
like 20 other alumni of our university, was killed in the attack on the
World Trade Center. In grief and pride they told stories about their son,
and showed me photographs, awards, and diplomas that chronicled his young
life. They were speaking to me, I knew, as the president of the institution
their son had loved but also as a priest. They asked if I would like to
go upstairs and see their sons bedroom, which they had kept exactly
as he had left it. Perhaps they would have asked the same of the president
of Harvard University or Stanford University. Perhaps not. But as a priest
I was glad to be there to offer whatever comfort I could. Such moments
have been part of my life as a priest, and as a result I feel truly blessed
by God. I do not deny that there have been times of suffering and sorrow
in my life. Like so many others, I feel betrayed and saddened by the shameful
incidents of sexual misconduct committed by some priests, so devastating
and harmful, especially to children and their families. But I trust that
God and his people will sustain me and my fellow priests, now and in the
future, and that my vocation, with all of its gifts, will never cease
to be the wonderfully fulfilling experience that it is for me today.

A
Plan for the New Millenium (Fr. Robert J. Carr)
The Roman Catholic Church has secularized itself and turned itself
into a corporation. This is the center of the confusion.... We are supposed
to be a community of faith. Ultimately, the issue, therefore, is whether
we are a community of faith or a corporation. It is time to make the choice.
The difference between a corporation and community of faith is all about
how we define our association as members of the Roman Catholic Church.
We were founded for one reason: God so loved the world that in the
fullness of time, he sent his only begotten son that whosoever believes
in him may not die, but have eternal life. We maintain that Jesus
is resurrected. Many outside Christianity do not understand what that
means in the long run, yet to put it simply: Believing in the resurrection
of the dead means to live in a mindset that is so radical that once someone
begins to comprehend this truth, they live their lives in radical ways
not possible prior to that moment. Indeed, it is such a key aspect of
our faith, that St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15 that if Jesus did
not resurrect from the dead, we are wasting our time. I guess that is
the best, yet quite poor, way of explaining what the depth of this fully
inexpressible truth says to us.

Holiness
Is the Key (Fr. Roger Landry)
The only adequate response to this terrible scandal, the only fully
Catholic response to this scandal — as St. Francis of Assisi recognized
in the 1200s, and as countless other saints have recognized in every century
— is holiness! Every crisis that the Church faces, every crisis that the
world faces, is a crisis of saints. Holiness is crucial, because it is
the real face of the Church. There are always people — a priest meets
them regularly, you probably know several of them — who use excuses for
why they dont practice the faith, why they slowly commit spiritual
suicide. It can be because a nun was mean to them when they were 9. Or
because they dont understand the teaching of the Church on a particular
issue — as if any of these reasons would truly justify their lack of practice
of the faith, as if any of them would be able to convince their consciences
not to do what they know they should. There will doubtless be many people
these days — and you will probably meet them — who will say, Why
should I practice the faith, why should I go to Church, since the Church
cant be true if Gods so-called chosen ones can do the types
of things weve been reading about? This scandal is a huge
hanger on which some will try to hang their justification for not practicing
the faith. Thats why holiness is so important. They need to find
in all of us a reason for faith, a reason for hope, a reason for responding
with love to the love of the Lord. The beatitudes which we have in todays
Gospel are a recipe for holiness. We all need to live them more.

March
10, 2002, Homily (Msgr. Thomas Kane)
What do we say? Immorality has no defense, does it? Abuse of minors
has no defense. For our religious leaders, it may be absolutely inexcusable.
And our hearts go out indeed to the victims of child abuse at the hands
of churchmen. I cannot explain the Boston situation satisfactorily, and
I cannot excuse Palm Beach. But as your pastor I should like to share
some personal reflections with which you may identify and, hopefully,
that will ameliorate some of the anguish that we feel – indeed embarrassment,
as Catholics, that we all feel in view of the recent events.... I can
honestly tell you that, after all these years, my idealism about the priesthood
is exactly the same as it was when I served mass as a kid. It has not
deteriorated. It has not been jeopardized. It has not diminished. And
I think I can speak from the experience of knowing maybe 3,000 priests,
and therefore knowing more of abuses than the average person would. And
nonetheless to say unhesitatingly to you, the priesthood in its ideals,
in its ministry, in its practice, is no less good, holy and outreaching
as you ever thought it was. I say that to you as one whos seen much
of the sordid side of the life, sometimes, of my brothers, but also to
reassure you that you are not to be disillusioned by the stories of the
New York Times or Time magazine or the Washington Post or Boston Globe.
You are not to be disillusioned. The priesthood is everything I thought
it was as a kid, and from that vantage point of many years later, I would
like to assure you that we are in this thing with you, we suffer with
you, we know that embarrassment that you face, when maybe members of our
faith nod knowingly to you, when those who are critical, when those who
would smirk, when those who are cynical – Id like to just say to
you: We know we have our problems, but we have a priesthood that is as
dedicated and holy and generous as ever it was.

What
the Titanic teaches (Stephen Cox)
Investigation revealed that the Titanic had been following normal
navigational practices and that she was equipped with more than normal
safety features  including 200 more lifeboat spaces than government
regulations required. In fact, more than 400 of the Titanics lifeboat
spaces were never used. A very large ship, like a very large plane, is
hard to evacuate completely; even if the Titanic had provided lifeboat
spaces equal to the number of passengers, there would not have been enough
time to use them all. No plans or regulations can guarantee that any vessel
 or any human enterprise  is completely safe. Every action,
even the apparently obvious action of turning a ship to evade an iceberg,
carries with it an incalculable risk. And our moral decisions are just
as risky as our practical decisions. The Titanic continues to fascinate
the world because it raised this essential fact to the highest pitch of
dramatic intensity. The Titanic sank [Apr. 14-15, 1912] in two hours and
forty minutes  the length of a classic play. During that time, everyone
involved in the disaster had to ask the most basic questions about what
life is worth and what means may be used to save it. People had time to
think, observe, reflect; but they finally had to decide, irrevocably,
what they ought to do. Their decisions were as various as the individuals
themselves.

Its
a war, not a grudge match (George Jonas)
In his Rose Garden speech on April 4 announcing Mr. Powells
mission, the President struck a lyrical note: America itself counts
former adversaries as trusted friends  Germany and Japan and now
Russia, Mr. Bush said. Conflict is not inevitable. Distrust
need not be permanent. Peace is possible when we break free of old patterns
and habits of hatred. What Mr. Bush failed to mention was that Germany
was flattened and de-Nazified before it became Americas trusted
friend; imperial Japan was nuked, and Soviet Russia had imploded. The
friendship of these nations was preceded by a complete collapse and fundamental
restructuring of their respective societies. One wishes the Mideast conflict
were just a grudge match between two old men. Unfortunately, it isnt.
Its a war between the Jewish state and those who have been trying
to reject it for the past 54 years. Despite Mr. Bushs uplifting
speech, Mr. Powell probably lacks the illusions of Neville Chamberlain.
He isnt going to Ramallah as Chamberlain went to Munich in 1938,
with the lofty hope for peace in our time. Mr. Powell is hoping
only for a licence from the Arab world to wage his own war in peace. He
wants to finish a job in Iraq he left unfinished a decade ago.

Evils
triumph over conscience (Norman Doidge)
Spooked, America is unwilling to let Israel end Arafats reign
of terror. Washington has retreated into approaching him with a kind of
primitive behaviour-therapy that says, If he renounces terror
or If he controls terror, then we will talk to him. It is
as though all that matters is to get him to say the right words, never
mind his intentions; as if no distinction need be drawn between his strategic
goal  the destruction of Israel  and a tactical willingness
to say he opposes terror (when a lie serves his strategy). Arafat has
discovered, as Shakespeare understood, that the more brazen and relentless
ones acts of brutality, the more likely it is that one will be allowed
a second chance, and find even powerful men of conscience coming to ones
door offering to forget, to forgive and to give forgiveness a bad name.

How
white liberals destroyed black families (Anthony Covington)
It would be nice to put the blame for inequality of incomes between
African, Euro- and Asian Americans squarely where it belongs. Not on white
racism, the legacy of slavery and other dead or dying
nebulae, but on poor old Dad  wherever he is. Even he is not the
real villain. Rather, the most blame falls on American Democratic politicians
between 1949-1999, including Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter
and Bill Clinton. Their allies in the American left-wing devised the welfare
state, an institution that wrecked the African-American family better
than slavery or racism ever did. Hold on, I hear you say,
that sounds upside down? However, consider this; it is not
colour, religion or your education in the USA that makes you more likely
to end up in poverty, unemployed, on drugs and in crime. It is not having
a father. Fatherless families of whatever colour in the USA make up 70
per cent of criminals, drifters, unemployed and failures. Parenting and
not race is the major factor  undeniably so. Study after study confirms
it.

The
death of socialism (Roger Kimball)
It is one of the great ironies of modern history that socialism,
which promises a more humane, caring, and equitable society, has consistently
delivered a more oppressive and mismanaged one. Socialisms motto
 Muravchik optimistically offers it to us as socialism’s epitaph
 turns out to be: If you build it, they will leave.
If, one must add, they are allowed to leave. As Muravchik reminds us in
this excellent survey of socialist personalities and socialist experiments,
encouraging dissent is never high on a socialists agenda. The socialist
pretends to have glimpsed paradise on earth. Those who decline the invitation
to embrace the vision are not just ungrateful: they are traitors to the
cause of human perfection. Dissent is therefore not mere disagreement
but treachery. Treachery is properly met not with arguments but (as circumstances
permit) the guillotine, the concentration camp, the purge.

Understanding
history (Balint Vazsonyi)
At last, reparations for slavery have taken center-stage. It has
been like waiting for the other shoe to drop, ever since the United States
decided to compensate persons of Japanese ancestry for their treatment
following Pearl Harbor. Once we accepted the proposition whereby the attitudes
of the present, though no less transitory than those of the past, should
nonetheless be applied to the past, we mortgaged the future. We can no
more relive the past than foretell the future. The appropriate expression
of disagreement with the ways of the past is to change those ways in the
present, for what we believe will be a better future. Attempts at rectifying
the past are bound to fail because, owing to obvious limitations, they
have to be selective. Unavoidably, what we see as old injustices will
result in new injustices.

The
Mau-Mauing at Harvard (John McWhorter)
The campus race game has largely prevented any sustained investigation
into what  if anything  Afro-American studies programs actually
accomplish academically. The assumption in the mainstream press during
the West-Summers contretemps was that the intellectual quality of Harvards
Afro-American studies was unassailable. Unfortunately, thats far
from true. Survey the departments undergraduate curriculum, and
you find that most of the courses express the pernicious belief that victimhood
defines what it means to be African-American  that to be black in
America has always been a story of betrayal, disappointment, passivity,
and tragedy, and that when things seem to be improving, its only
an illusion.

Hunt
the Boeing! (Urban Legends Reference Pages)
The notion that the Pentagon was not damaged by terrorists who hijacked
American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and crashed it into the military
office complex, but that the whole affair was staged by the U.S. government,
has been promulgated by French author Thierry Meyssan in his book, The
Frightening Fraud. Meyssan offers no real explanation for what
did cause the extensive damage to the Pentagon, asserting only that Flight
77 did not exist, no plane crashed into the Pengaton, and that the
American government is lying. Unfortunately, the appeal of conspiracy
theories has resulted in widespread dissemination of Meyssans theory
in France and the USA, particularly in web sites that mirror his work.
As Le Nouvel Observateur noted: This theory suits everyone
 there are no Islamic extremists and everyone is happy. It eliminates
reality. The text cited in the example above comes from a
Hunt the Boeing! And test your perceptions! web site, one of
the English-language mirrors of Meyssans claims, where readers are
invited to ponder a series of questions about why photographs of the damaged
Pentagon seemingly show no evidence of a crashed airplane. The answers
to the questions are....

Are
Michael Bellesiless Critics Afraid to Say What They Really Think?
(Jerome Sternstein)
Has the time come to ask if Michael Bellesiless Arming
America is an example of scholarly deceit? Some defenders of Bellesiless
work have insisted in various forums that Bellesiless critics have
yet to bring forth any evidence to suggest scholarly fraud. Recently,
in making his case, one apologist pointed to the searching examinations
of Bellesiless book in the January 2002 issue of the William
and Mary Quarterly (WMQ), which, although severely critical,
eschews charges of fraud or misrepresentation. To be sure, charges
of fraud do not appear in the Quarterlys forum on Bellesiles.
But what is truly remarkable about that forum is what does appear there:
scathing appraisals of his books misuse of sources and evidence
which some might regard as consistent with academic fraud, such as repeatedly
misquoting, distorting, falsifying, or perhaps even deliberately inventing
evidence to support ones thesis.

The
slavery reparations hustle (Jeff Jacoby)
Dont bother telling the plaintiffs who sued last month to
collect reparations for slavery from three US corporations that they dont
have a legal leg to stand on. They already know it. After all, you dont
need a law degree to recognize that FleetBoston, CSX, and Aetna bear no
legal culpability today because of lawful activities their corporate ancestors
may have engaged in two centuries ago. Even unlawful activities were long
ago mooted by statutes of limitations. And in any case, none of the companies
being sued and none of their living shareholders has ever owned or trafficked
in slaves, just as none of the plaintiffs and none of the 36 million black
Americans whose interests they claim to represent has ever been held in
bondage. These specious lawsuits will never win. But then, they were never
expected to. The plaintiffs and their lawyers make no secret of the fact
that their goal is not to win a legal verdict but to pressure the companies
into making lucrative out-of-court settlements. If they balk, the lawyers
PR machine will generate ugly publicity about the companies insensitivity
to African-Americans. Set up pickets outside their corporate headquarters.
Threaten a national boycott. Maybe arrange a public denunciation by Al
Sharpton or the Congressional Black Caucus. It isnt hard to mau-mau
corporate America if you know how to play the race card.

Big
earners hit hard by income tax (Houston Chronicle)
Another way the rich are different: They pay the lions share
of the nations income tax bill. The wealthiest 5 percent pay more
than half the taxes, while people in the bottom half pay 4 percent. The
annual federal tax deadline for most of America is next Monday. Two-income
households are increasing, putting more families in the top slice of taxpayers.
Millions of small businesses and partnerships are up there, too, paying
personal instead of corporate income taxes. Many other people were boosted
by the 1990s stock market boom. President Bushs big tax cut will
prevent the wealthy from paying an even greater share in coming years.
But key provisions, such as the doubling of the child tax credit, will
cut or eliminate income taxes for many middle-income people, while the
rich wont qualify.

Congress
Sets Record for Pork Spending (FOXNews)
A war and a recession did not stop Congress from doling out the
pork for special hometown projects, a government watchdog is reporting
Tuesday. Citizens Against Government Waste is releasing its annual Pig
Book, a listing of what it calls the most egregious examples of
special interest spending. The results are grim, but not surprising, group
officials said. Taxpayers will be disappointed, said Thomas
Schatz, president of CAGW. Here they are, sitting around doing their
taxes  a good time to be thinking what theyre getting for
their money, and in this case its a pretty bad deal. According
to the group, members of Congress seem to be the only ones not tightening
their belts since the economy took a downturn and the country started
fighting a war against terrorism. Pork  that is, excessive spending
for members pet projects, which usually grease the skids for special
interest and hometown support  increased 9 percent in fiscal year
2002 to $20 billion. The number of pork projects increased 32 percent
to a total of 8,341.

Added April 22, 2002

Safe
House: High-end Panic Room hideouts becoming more common (SFC)
Paula Milani bought a home with three bedrooms, two baths and one
Batcave. Her secret hideout is behind a seamless wall in her one-story
ranch house in rural Livermore. A robber could break in, check every room
and never know shes a few feet away, calling authorities as she
loads a handgun. Milani is one of the hundreds of Bay Area residents who
have a real-life panic room, which real estate insiders used
to call safe rooms before the hit movie starring Jodie Foster came out.
Some are converted closets with doors that bolt shut from the inside.
Others are like Milanis  with secret entrances that are impossible
to detect unless you know where they are. And a few are similar to Fosters
fortresslike hideout in Panic Room, or even more intricate,
with heat-sensing cameras, multiple ventilation systems and chemical washbasins
for scrubbing away biohazards. In Los Angeles, most A-list celebrities
and entertainment executives have safe rooms, said Bill Rigdon, who is
a vice president of Building Consensus, a Los Angeles company that builds
the hideaways. He said Bay Area safe-room owners are a little less conspicuous.
Its the guy who owns the grocery store chain, software people,
an owner of several hundred business franchises, said Rigdon, who
has built more than a dozen safe rooms from San Jose to Marin County.
During the next fiasco, where do you want to be?

Among
the Bourgeoisophobes: Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way,
hate America and Israel. (David Brooks)
Around 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked
around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were
running the world.... Hatred of the bourgeoisie became the official emotion
of the French intelligentsia.... Of all the great creeds of the 19th century,
pretty much the only one still thriving is this one, bourgeoisophobia....
Since September 11, there has been a great deal of analysis of the roots
of Muslim rage. But to anybody familiar with the history of bourgeoisophobia,
it is striking how comfortably Muslim rage meshes with traditional rage
against meritocratic capitalism. The Islamist fanatic and the bourgeoisophobe
hate the same things. They use the same words, they utter the same protests.
In an essay in the New York Review of Books called Occidentalism,
Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma listed the traits that enrage al Qaeda
and other Third World anti-Americans and anti-Westerners. First, they
hate the city. Cities stand for commerce, mixed populations, artistic
freedom, and sexual license. Second, they hate the mass media: advertising,
television, pop music, and videos. Third, they hate science and technology
 the progress of technical reason, mechanical efficiency, and material
know-how. Fourth, they hate prudence, the desire to live safely rather
than court death and heroically flirt with violence. Fifth, they hate
liberty, the freedom extended even to mediocre people. Sixth, they despise
the emancipation of women. As Margalit and Buruma note, Female emancipation
leads to bourgeois decadence. Women are supposed to stay home and
breed heroic men. When women go out into the world, they deprive men of
their manhood and weaken their virility. If you put these six traits together,
you have pretty much the pillars of meritocratic capitalist society, practiced
most assertively in countries like America and Israel.

Myths
of the Crusades hard to kill (Vincent Carroll)
You look at the latest U.S. News & World Report
cover story, on the Crusades, and you figure theyve got to be kidding.
You know they cant be serious in proclaiming the Crusades the
first major clash between Islam and Western Christendom, or in headlining
the Crusades  in both print and in the version at USNews.com 
as The First Holy War. No sober journalist or historian could
claim that During the Crusades, East and West first met  on
the battlefield, and expect any reader even casually familiar with
world history not to leap out of the chair in exasperated shock. Its
a gag, almost certainly, when U.S. News quotes the chair
of Islamic studies at American University as solemnly maintaining that
The impact of the Crusades created a historical memory which is
with us today  the memory of a long European onslaught. No
serious news journal would let such a statement stand without some mention
of what happened before 1099 and the sack of Jerusalem by the
likes of Tancred and Godfrey of Bouillon.... Like so many articles on
the Crusades since the attacks of Sept. 11, U.S. News takes
for granted the idea that the Crusades constitute a looming grievance
against the West that rightly resonates to this day. And it would be funny,
this journalistic malpractice, if it didnt buttress the convictions
of the fanatics who are still seeking revenge.

Chinas
Economic Facade (Arthur Waldron)
Officially, China has for some time been claiming growth rates of
7 percent or more. But information casting doubt on those figures has
long been available. Visitors see lots of rural people camped out at urban
railroad stations or on sidewalks: Clearly they have nothing to do where
they come from, or where they have arrived. Block after block of abandoned
construction projects in cities suggest someone has run out of money (as
does the recent proposal that money be raised for the Three Gorges Dam
by selling stock). Almost daily protests by workers, many violent, are
also a clue that all is not well. Moreover, even the official figures
dont make sense: How can it be that energy use is falling in a booming
economy? And unemployment rising (as the official statistics show)? This
is unprecedented in economic history. Finally, the state borrowing for
pump priming to which Premier Zhu refers has always been public knowledge.
Why, if the economy is burning up the track, has stimulus been necessary?
Once again Chinese officialdom has put one over on Western observerdom.
The shining exception is Prof. Thomas Rawski of the University of Pittsburgh,
who over the past year or so has been making thoroughly empirical and
highly persuasive presentations across the United States on Chinas
economy, based entirely on open Chinese sources, comparisons with other
fast-growing economies and some solid economic analysis. He argues that
Chinas economy may actually have been contracting since 1998.

They
are the product of institutionally indoctrinated hatred of the West or
of Jews (Howard Gerson and Harold Waller)
The myth that suicide bombers are necessarily produced by desperate
or inhumane conditions should have been fully dispelled by
the suicide attacks of Sept. 11, which were carried out by highly indoctrinated
and motivated individuals who were neither economically deprived nor oppressed.
Rather, they had been living freely in the United States for years. For
many of us, this lack of desperation or of any apparent oppression was
one of the most intellectually indigestible facts to emerge from the investigation
post-Sept. 11. Perhaps there is a powerful need in Western culture to
ascribe something other than simple hatred to explain a phenomenon as
extreme as a suicide attack. Similarly, the idea that such attacks are
the result of an institutionally indoctrinated hatred of the West or of
Jews is repugnant to our rational and liberal approach. The Western psyche
demands a reason to make sense out of the act: The homicidal
terrorist must suffer from desperation, humiliation,
or "hopelessness." There must be another side or
a missing link to the story. Yet the evidence that the recent
suicide attacks in Israel are the result of indoctrinated hatred actively
carried out or condoned by Yasser Arafats Palestinian Authority,
and by the Arab states, is overwhelming.

Bush
must face truth about Arab terror against Israel (Norman Podhoretz)
A linguistic child of the concept of moral equivalence, the words
cycle of violence allow of no distinction between terrorist
attacks and retaliation against them. They allow of no distinction between
the deliberate murder of civilians and the inadvertent harm done to civilians
in a military action. And in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict
(itself a deceptive label for what should actually be called the
Arab war against Israel), to speak of a cycle of violence
is to conjure up a Hatfield-McCoy type of feud between equally irrational
parties. This maneuver is calculated to conceal the crucial fact that
Palestinian terrorism is neither a random nor an uncontrollable nor a
senseless phenomenon. On the contrary: it is a tactic carefully
designed to advance a precise objective. And that objective is to wipe
the Jewish state physically off the map, just as Israel is erased from
the maps of the region printed in the textbooks given to Palestinian and
other Arab schoolchildren.

Journal
Editors Disavow Article on Biotech Corn (WP)
The science journal Nature has concluded that a controversial article
it published last year on the discovery of genetically engineered corn
growing in Mexico was not well researched enough and should not have been
published. In a highly unusual editorial note in this weeks
edition of the journal, the editors said that based on criticisms of the
article and assessments by outside referees, Nature has concluded
that the evidence available is not sufficient to justify the publication
of the original paper. .... The initial study had been embraced
by anti-biotechnology activists, who said it confirmed worries that the
technology was spreading in uncontrolled and unapproved ways. But Natures
near-retraction of the article was welcomed by advocates for the technology.

Say
goodbye, Yasser Arafat (Mark Steyn)
Its very difficult to negotiate a two-state solution
when one side sees the two-state solution as an intermediate stage to
a one-state solution: ending the Israeli occupation of the
West Bank is a tactical prelude to ending the Israeli occupation of Israel.
The divide among the Palestinians isnt between those who want to
make peace with Israel and those who want to destroy her, but between
those who want to destroy Israel one suicide bomb at a time and those
who want to destroy her through artful peace processes....
As for the Palestinians, theyre a wrecked people. Its tragic,
and, if you want to argue about whos to blame, we can bat dates
around back to the Great War. But it doesnt matter. It doesnt
even matter whether you regard, as the Europeans appear to, the Palestinians
descent into depravity as confirmation of their victim status: as Palestinian
Authority spokesman Hasan Abdul Rahman said on CNN after a new pile of
Jewish corpses, its the fault of Israel for turning our children
into suicide bombers. Might be true, might be rubbish. Makes no
difference. They cant be allowed to succeed, because otherwise the
next generation of suicide bombers will be in Bloomingdales and
Macys. Thats why Arafat will never be president of a Palestinian
state, and has begun his countdown to oblivion. The unravelling of the
Middle East has just begun.

Fawning
Critics Dont Say Book Was Fraud (Glenn Harlan Reynolds)
In the fall of 2000, professor Michael Bellesiles of Emory University
published his book Arming America, which purported to establish
that the core historical argument behind the Second Amendment was a fraud.
The brave minuteman armed with his trusty rifle, Bellesiles told us, was
mostly a myth  Americans at the time of the Revolution, and for
many decades afterward, seldom owned guns, but instead relied on the government
for protection. Bellesiles received glowing reviews in the New York
Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the
Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications, from reviewers
who were often visibly pleased that he was sticking it to the National
Rifle Association. As it turns out, the fraud was on Bellesiles
end. At least, thats the conclusion of those who have examined his
work  from journalists, to historians, to law professors 
and found it wanting. Bellesiles turns out to have quoted sources out
of context, to have falsely reported data, and to have claimed to have
used documents that have not existed since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
One historian familiar with Bellesiles work called it a case of
bona fide academic fraud. Emory University is investigating....
Yet despite all these problems with Bellesiles work, many of the
publications that afforded his book so much laudatory attention when it
came out have remained silent.

Crusade
Propaganda: The abuse of Christianitys holy wars. (Thomas Madden)
The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in
European history.... The crusades were in every way a defensive war.
They were the Wests belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully
two-thirds of the Christian world. While the Arabs were busy in the seventh
through the tenth centuries winning an opulent and sophisticated empire,
Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging
out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were
Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to
the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor
(modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the
loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic
Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact.... Despite modern
laments about medieval colonialism, the crusades real purpose was
to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to
Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western
reaction to Muslim advances. The crusades were no more offensive than
was the American invasion of Normandy.

Understanding
America (Owen Harries)
The great sympathy felt for America immediately after September
11 has quickly evaporated and been replaced by suspicion and hostility.
Rosemary Righter, chief leader write of the London Times, has observed
recently that America-bashing is in fashion as it has not been since
Vietnam  and she is talking, not of Asia and the Middle East,
but of London and Paris and Berlin. Moreover she asserts that it is not
just a case of the usual suspects on the Left, but that a resurgent
anti-Americanism exists across the political spectrum. As she says,
America is never less loved in Europe than when... it is angry,
determined, and certain that it is in the right. Let me be clear:
After the outrage of September 11, I do not believe that the United States
could have reacted in any way other than as she did. But doing so will
carry a cost. The long term significance of what happened some months
ago may be that it forced American decisively along a course of action
that  by emphasising her military dominance, by requiring her to
use her vast power conspicuously, by making restraint and moderation virtually
impossible, and by making unilateralism an increasing feature of American
behavior  is bound to generate widespread and increased criticism
and hostility towards her. That may turn out to be the real tragedy of
September 11.

Religion
of Peace Update (Rod Dreher)
On the way to work [NYC] this morning [Apr. 3, 2002], I stopped
into an Arab-owned convenience store to buy a newspaper. A wiry Arab man,
about my age and looking like a tightly coiled spring, stood by the counter
holding a clipboard. You should not buy that one, he said
to me in a thick accent, as I picked up a New York Post.
You should buy this one. Its more fair about this story,
he said, holding up a Daily News  which, like the Post,
reports the Bethlehem siege on its front page. The mans eyes were
hot, and I didnt want to argue with him. I told him I prefer the
Post. But they print lies about Palestine! he
said, his voice rising (the Post's editorial policy is strongly
pro-Israel). Hitler, he knew what the those people were about. He
knew that if you give them freedom, they will take over your country,
just like they have done here. And Im not just saying that because
Im a Muslim. I pointed out to the man, as calmly as I could,
that Hitler killed six million Jews. Not true! he shot back,
sticking his finger in my face. Its a lie! I turned
and walked out without saying a word more. Because there is nothing left
to say to such fanatics.

Quiet
time campaign muzzle (Jacob Sullum)
No one disputes that the First Amendment applies to opinions about
who should run the government and what the government should do. Yet in
the topsy-turvy world of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, the closer
speech gets to the sort of political expression the Framers clearly meant
to protect, the more restricted it is. An organization may criticize a
politician, so long as the message is timed so its not likely to
change anyones vote. Or it may discuss an issue, so long as it does
not mention a particular officials position on it. What it may not
do is engage in electioneering communication  speech
that might actually have a political impact. These restrictions do not
apply to news organizations, which helps explain why so many of them looked
favorably on campaign finance reform. (For newspapers and magazines, as
Reasons Jeff Taylor has noted, there was also the possibility of
attracting ad revenue that would otherwise go to TV and radio stations.)
Unlike environmentalists and anti-abortion activists, journalists remain
free to discuss the merits of candidates at any time and in any terms
they choose.

Area
man says father shot Martin Luther King Jr. (Gainesville Sun)
Claiming he wanted to get a 34-year-old secret off his chest, an
Alachua County man said Tuesday that his father was the triggerman in
the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, the Rev.
Ronald Denton Wilson said, portions of the murder plot were hatched in
Gainesville.... My dad was the one who shot Dr. King, he said.
He said his father, Henry Clay Wilson, died in 1990 at age 68 and is buried
in Gainesville. His fathers two co-conspirators, R.D. Wilson said,
also are dead. Wilson, who lives near Keystone Heights, and several other
family members and ministry associates gathered at the Gainesville Community
Plaza to reveal what they said was the truth about the King assassination.
Wilson and his sister, Velma Roark of Waldo, said their father told them
many times over the years that he shot King.

Why
Do They Hate Us? (John Perazzo)
Since September 11, the uniquely introspective, self-critical people
known as Americans have asked this question countless times. What elusive
logic, we want to know, lies behind much of the Muslim worlds overt
hatred of our nation? Not surprisingly, our progressive social critics,
ever eager to explain the logical underpinnings of anti-Americanism, have
dutifully provided numerous answers to these questions.... Considering
the amount of time Americans have devoted to analyzing the aforementioned
questions, it is utterly remarkable that the opposite questions are never
raised: What have Muslim societies done to convince us that we should
not hate them? Have they demonstrated an ability to resist engaging in
meddlesome, cruel, decadent, or arrogant
behavior? These would be reasonable queries coming from a citizen of the
mostly-Christian United States, given that his or her fellow Christians
are treated abominably in much of the Islamic world.

Suicidal
Lies (Thomas Friedman)
The world must understand that the Palestinians have not chosen
suicide bombing out of desperation stemming from the Israeli
occupation. That is a huge lie. Why? To begin with, a lot of other people
in the world are desperate, yet they have not gone around strapping dynamite
to themselves. More important, President Clinton offered the Palestinians
a peace plan that could have ended their desperate occupation,
and Yasir Arafat walked away. Still more important, the Palestinians have
long had a tactical alternative to suicide: nonviolent resistance, à
la Gandhi. A nonviolent Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience
of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian state
30 years ago, but they have rejected that strategy, too.... Lets
be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic
choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization because
if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking
and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a
bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That
is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated.

We
shall not fear (David Warren)
We hang not on the Cross, but on Christs Resurrection. At
the centre of all Christian doctrine  and according to Christians,
at the centre of everything  is this one moment. It is not understood
as a miracle, but as the miracle at the heart, explaining all miracles
before and after. It was, or rather it is, the grand intersection between
the eternal and our own transitory world of space and time. Everything
in nature and in ourselves was  is  transformed by it. It
casts backwards through history as well as forwards, it gathers together
every strand of meaning, into one knot, into one flame, and is of the
moment with the Creation. And in prayer, and contemplation, the Christian
apprehends, through the fact of the Cross, and shining through the Cross,
the Resurrection. It is the lifting of the burden, the weight  of
sin, of mortality, of fate. Christ, according to the Gospels, came into
the world to abolish death. To abolish the tyranny over us, to free us
from our greatest fear. In the moment of contemplating Christs Resurrection,
we know the truth, and the truth has set us free.

Bogus
bias at MIT (John Leo)
The sad truth is that MIT, one of the world's great centers of scientific
education, has now produced and accepted two astonishingly unscientific
studies of its own administrative behavior. In response to these studies,
nobody on campus has spoken out. The people on the gender committees
control the airwaves on this story, and nobody will speak up, Steiger
says. And with good reason. If they speak, they will be branded
as misogynists, and their careers will be in jeopardy. Worse, the
culture of MIT is being changed. Gender equity has replaced scientific
merit as the value administrators will be judged by. And as always in
preference schemes, women on the faculty will now come under suspicion
as people who wouldnt be there except for politics. And all without
any real discussion or open debate. Amazing.

Listening
for the Voices of Women (NYT)
In the two decades since she wrote In a Different Voice
and went on to identify a crisis of confidence in adolescent girls 
a phenomenon Ms. Gilligan famously dubbed losing voice 
her work has attained the status of public gospel, inspiring pop psychology
books, feminist lobbies and op-ed columnists, and galvanizing policy makers.
Ms. Gilligan is often cited as an impetus behind the 1994 Gender Equity
in Education Act, which, with an eye toward improving girls test
scores, banned sex-role stereotyping and gender discrimination in the
classroom.... Meanwhile, social scientists were busy challenging her research.
In a Different Voice was attacked almost as soon as it appeared.
Some researchers rejected Ms. Gilligans claim that women were more
likely to consider their obligations to others (what she called an ethics
of care) in making moral decisions, while men were more likely
to rely on abstract principles of fairness (what she called an ethics
of justice). Ms. Gilligan was accused of using unorthodox
interview methods, of lacking control groups and of failing to publish
her data in peer-reviewed journals. In a 1983 article in the journal Social
Research, Debra Nails, now a philosophy professor at Michigan State University,
dismissed In a Different Voice as social science at
sea without anchor. Since then, trying to replicate Ms. Gilligans
findings has become a virtual social-science subfield, employing a small
army of researchers  with little success.

What
You Say Reveals How You Think (David Stolinsky)
The same paper, like most papers, takes great care to refer to anyone
who has not yet been convicted of a crime as an alleged or
accused murderer or rapist. This wording avoids lawsuits,
and more importantly, it follows the American tradition that one is presumed
innocent until proven guilty. So why is it that this paper began a story
about child abuse in the Catholic Church with the front-page headline
Mahony Wont Name Abusers. Not one of these priests had
been charged with a crime, much less convicted, or their names would already
be a matter of public record. But those Cardinal Mahony didnt name
were not referred to as alleged abusers. Somehow the fear
of lawsuits, and the devotion to civil liberties, were forgotten in the
rush to condemn the Catholic Church  and, by extension, Christianity
in general. Accused murderers and rapists in jail awaiting trial are alleged,
but priests not formally charged with anything are abusers.
How inconsistent. But how revealing.

The
slyer virus: The Wests anti-westernism (Mark Steyn)
The Arabs say America is to blame for the Middle East. And Britain
and America dont disagree, not really. The Durban Syndrome 
the vague sense that the Wests success must somehow be responsible
for the rests failure  is a far slyer virus than the toxic
effusions of the Chomsky-Sontag set, and it has seeped far deeper into
the cultural bloodstream. At its most benign, Durban Syndrome manifests
itself in a desire not to offend others if one can offend ones own
instead. We saw this after September 11 in the incessant exhortations
from government, public service announcements, the nations pastors
and vicars, etc., that the American people should resist their natural
appetite for pogroms and refrain from brutalizing Muslims. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine
percent of Americans had no intention of brutalizing Muslims but they
were sporting enough to put up with being characterized as a bunch of
knuckledragging swamp-dwellers, understanding that diversity means not
just being sensitive to other peoples but also not being too sensitive
about yourself. Similarly, at airports across the continent, eighty-seven-year-old
grannies waited patiently as their hairpins were confiscated and their
bloomers emptied out on the conveyor belt, implicitly accepting this as
a ritual of the multicultural society: to demonstrate that we eschew racial
profiling, we go out of our way to look for people who dont
look anything like the people were looking for.... I am woman, hear
me roar! Say it loud, Im black and proud! Were here, were
queer, get used to it! The one identity were not encouraged to trumpet
is the one that enables us to trumpet all the others: our identity as
citizens of a very particular kind of society, built on the rule of law,
property rights, freedom of expression, and the universal franchise. I
am Western, hear me apologize!

A
Turn from Tolerance (WP)
Long before Sept. 11, many white Europeans had deep-running concerns
that their countries were involuntarily becoming multicultural as guest
workers and refugees, mostly Muslim, established themselves in residence.
There are about 15 million Muslims in Europe, making Islam the the continents
largest non-Christian religion. The post-Sept. 11 concerns underscored
a paradox that has cycled through European politics for years: The continent
needs foreign workers to gird an aging workforce but is queasy about accepting
them, especially if they are Muslim. There is this fear for national
identity combined with a fear of Muslims that has fueled this debate on
immigration, said Jan Niessen, director of the Migration Policy
Group, a research organization in Brussels.

As
the Web Matures, Fun Is Hard to Find (NYT)
Just 11 years after it was born and about 6 years after it became
popular, the Web has lost its luster. Many who once raved about surfing
from address to address on the Web now lump site-seeing with other online
chores, like checking the In box. What attracted many people to the Web
in the mid-1990s were the bizarre and idiosyncratic sites that began
as private obsessions and swiftly grew into popular attractions: the Coffee
Cam, a live image of a coffee maker at the University of Cambridge; the
Fish Tank Cam from an engineer at Netscape; The Spot, the first online
soap opera; the Jennicam, the first popular Internet peephole; the Telegarden,
which allowed viewers to have remote control of a robot gardener; and
the World Wide Ouija, where viewers could question the Fates with the
computer mouse. The Web was like a chest of toys, and each day brought
a new treasure.... The problem facing the Web is not that some of these
particular sites have come and gone  there are, after all, only
so many times anyone can look at a coffeepot, even online  but that
no new sites have come along to captivate the casual surfer.

Whats
news for the experts is common knowledge to most (Kay Hymowitz)
Not so long ago, everyone knew that children  boys and girls
 were cruel, aggressive, Darwinian creatures who needed adults around
to teach them self-restraint. William Goldings classic 1954 novel
Lord of the Flies, a disturbing story of English private
school students deserted on an island after an airplane crash, illustrated
the point most dramatically. It was common knowledge that, while girls
didnt often resort to fisticuffs, they were prone to back-stabbing,
manipulation and scheming, a fact known to everyone from William Thackeray,
who created the infamous Becky Sharpe in the novel Vanity Fair
to Charles Schultz, inventor of Charlie Browns nemesis, Lucy. But
in the late 1960s, development experts began revising the commensense
view of childrens natural ethical state. This was partly because
of the influence of the liberation movements of the time, partly to address
changes in the family such as divorce and working mothers that made autonomous
children a necessity.... But after a dramatic rise in juvenile crime and
bullying, a slew of suburban school shootings, and just the daily grind
of adult-child warfare, this theory was bound to disappoint.

U.S.
maintains the upper hand (David Warren)
As I reported in this newspaper on Friday, the jailing,
or rather probationing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has been taken
over from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, by U.S. Vice-President
Dick Cheney. It is an extremely significant step, not because it disempowers
the Israelis, but because it puts the United States forward directly in
the role of Israel's protector, negotiating on Israels behalf. While
lost on the western media, the point has been taken in several capitals
of the Arab world: Mr. Arafat and his terrorist groups are no longer simply
confronting Israel. They are now confronting a United States that is increasingly
aware of their international connections. Mr. Cheney set the conditions
for a meeting between himself and Mr. Arafat in Cairo yesterday, which
did not take place because Mr. Arafat did not meet them. The essential,
verifiable condition was that Mr. Arafat would deliver a public address,
to his people, in unambiguous Arabic, demanding an immediate end to all
terrorist strikes against Israel, and be seen delivering like orders to
all the Palestinian militias under his ultimate command. Instead, he appeared
on Palestinian TV looking as if he were a hostage reading a prepared statement
by his kidnapper. He condemned, after the fact, only one particular suicide
bombing in Jerusalem. This was 11 eggs short of a dozen.

Stranglehold
on Speech (Robert Samuelson)
Free speech is not selective speech, respectable speech or popular
speech. Free speech does not exist unless it can include speech that you
 and perhaps most people  despise. People must have, as individuals
and as groups, the routine right to express themselves, even if their
expressions offend. Somehow these truths escape the supporters of campaign
finance reform, whose crusade threatens free speech.... In the final
60 days before the 2000 election, more than 135,000 political advertisements
were run by sponsors who werent candidates or the political committees
of candidates, reports the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
The new campaign finance legislation  known variously as McCain-Feingold
and Shays-Meehan after its main Senate and House sponsors  aims
to remove many (if not most) of these ads by non-candidates from the air.
Unless political advertisements arent speech, this represents
a massive suppression of free speech.... Free speech must be a concept
that ordinary people can grasp in most ordinary circumstances. It must
not become a lawyerly collection of qualifications, footnotes and regulations,
and that is where the campaign finance crusade is leading.

Bleak
future looms if you dont take a stand (Dan Gillmor)
This is a quiz about your future. Its about how you view some
basic elements of the emerging Digital Age. 1. Do you care if a few giant
companies control virtually all entertainment and information? 2. Do you
care if they decide what kinds of technological innovations will reach
the marketplace? 3. Would you be concerned if they used their power to
compile detailed dossiers on everything you read, listen to, view and
buy? 4. Would you find it acceptable if they could decide whether what
you write and say could be seen and heard by others? Those are no longer
theoretical questions. They are the direction in which America is hurtling.
Media conglomerates are in a merger frenzy. Telecommunications monopolies
are creating a cozy cartel, dividing up access to the online world. The
entertainment industry is pushing for Draconian controls on the use and
dissemination of digital information.

The
Great Terror (Jeffrey Goldberg)
Gosden believes it is quite possible that the countries of the West
will soon experience chemical- and biological-weapons attacks far more
serious and of greater lasting effect than the anthrax incidents of last
autumn and the nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway system several years
ago  that what happened in Kurdistan was only the beginning. For
Saddams scientists, the Kurds were a test population, she
said. They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying
the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and
the most effective means of delivery. The charge is supported by
others. An Iraqi defector, Khidhir Hamza, who is the former director of
Saddams nuclear-weapons program, told me earlier this year that
before the attack on Halabja military doctors had mapped the city, and
that afterward they entered it wearing protective clothing, in order to
study the dispersal of the dead. These were field tests, an experiment
on a town, Hamza told me. He said that he had direct knowledge of
the Armys procedures that day in Halabja. The doctors were
given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such
as How far are the dead from the cannisters? Gosden
said that she cannot understand why the West has not been more eager to
investigate the chemical attacks in Kurdistan. It seems a matter
of enlightened self-interest that the West would want to study the long-term
effects of chemical weapons on civilians, on the DNA, she told me.
Ive seen Europes worst cancers, but, believe me, I have
never seen cancers like the ones I saw in Kurdistan.

The
good, the bad and the Gallic shrug (Mark Steyn)
Countries A and B may be at war, but there is no good side and no
bad side, just two parties trapped in a mindless
cycle of violence that threatens the peace process.
The peace process tends to be no peace and lotsa process,
in which Western panjandrums have invested considerable amounts of their
prestige. Thats why in Paris this weekend most of my dining companions
were outraged not by the deaths of Palestinians or Israelis but by the
shelling of Palestinian Authority buildings. These buildings,
one indignant Frenchman told me, were built with money direct from
the Union!  i.e., the European Union. We have given
billions, and now it is rubble. Oh, your money's perfectly
safe, I said. Its sitting in the Hamas bigshots numbered
bank accounts in Zurich. .... Forget the cycle of violence
and the peace process. History teaches us that the most lasting
peace is achieved when one side  preferably the worst side 
is decisively defeated and the regimes diseased organs are comprehensively
cleansed. Thats why National Socialism, Fascism and Japanese militarism
have not troubled us of late.

Households
Divided (Jean Bethke Elshtain)
Wilson argues that the destructive features of a world without fathers
are by now so well documented that they are beyond challenge. No responsible
person wants to see that world expand, given its clear and present dangers.
But how did it come about, and how are we to bring the second nation closer
to the standard of the first in order to ensure that, in the parlance
of the moment, no child is left behind? Wilson reminds us that when Sen.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan first alerted the country in 1960 to the troubles
looming on the horizon as the world of fatherlessness and rising out-of-wedlock
birth was coming into view, he was denounced, accused of everything from
racism to sexism to cultural imperialism, even as many people within the
black community were saying the same thing  that a leap in fatherlessness
was a pathology. But that made no difference to the mainstream
media or scholarship. As a result, it was easy for the first nation, irresponsibly,
to ignore the problem of the second. Forty years later, facing an epidemic
in teenage motherhood  by 1995, three out of every four births
to all teenagers were to unmarried girls; for black girls, it was nine
out of ten  the alarm bells finally went off as politicians
and social analysts converged on the same point: This trend cannot continue,
as too much measurable harm is being done to children. As the evidence
piled up, even those most resistant to the notion that fatherlessness
as an independent factor generated risk factors for children, whatever
the familys socio-economic status, were forced to acknowledge the
data. Children in one-parent families, compared to those in two-parent
ones, are twice as likely to drop out of school. Boys in one-parent families
are much more likely than those in two-parent ones to be both out of school
and out of work. Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely as those
in two-parent ones to have an out-of-wedlock birth.

How
Oscar Ghettoized Poitier (John Podhoretz)
The spin on the evening was that it made history because two black
performers won Best Actor and Best Actress on the same night that the
first black movie star, Sidney Poitier, received an honorary Oscar. But
there was something terribly retrogressive about the way all this was
treated. The Oscar show worked overtime to make us think of Denzel Washington,
Halle Berry and Poitier not as unique and remarkable talents but rather
as tokens. Why were only black actors and actresses given a chance to
speak in the three-minute film tribute to Sidney Poitier? Did Poitiers
career really have meaning only to black performers? Of course not. His
extraordinary dignity and power gave the lie to the racist idea that white
audiences could only respond to white performers and white stories. In
a magnificent speech that was the highlight of the otherwise-unspeakable
ceremony, Poitier himself paid a powerful and modest tribute to the directors,
producers and studio heads who made history by casting him in the films
that made him a star. They were all white. So is Poitiers wife Joanna.
Poitier had two daughters with Joanna, who are therefore both black and
white. He is an integrationist not only professionally, but personally.
For him to be seen as an inspiration only to black people is
to ghettoize an extraordinary man who simply refused to accept the limits
of race.

Dumbing
Down the SAT: The very existence of intelligence differences in America
is about to become a forbidden truth. (Stanley Kurtz)
There was a time when Americans believed that finding and training
the countrys finest minds was in the national interest. Certainly,
all American children ought to have access to quality education. But,
ultimately, it is to our collective advantage as a nation to have a way
of identifying students of high aptitude. And it is fairer to students
themselves  especially those from lesser schools  to have
a way of recognizing intellectual potential that has not yet come to the
surface. The irony is that support for destruction of the SAT test comes
from a liberal elite that is itself the product of our educational meritocracy.
Guilt about success combines here with a hidden craving for moral superiority
over the benighted middle classes. Those in the middle  and many
minorities as well  still believe in the principles of liberty and
equality that created the meritocracy in the first place. But once again,
the liberal elite, in a conversation amongst itself, is managing to turn
our most basic values and practices inside out  with nary a peep
from a public that would fight these changes if they were honestly told
what is happening.

Of
conscience & cowardice (Robert Going)
I happen to believe in the sanctity of human life from conception
to natural death. While perhaps a minority view, it is generally not considered
an extreme position except by those who take delight in yanking babies
feet first three quarters of the way out of their mothers wombs,
sticking a needle in the head and sucking the brains out. Those people
would doubtless find my views radical. Still, if I had written what Ive
just written, or said it aloud in a public place at any time from 1985
when I first became a candidate for judicial office until I left the bench
in 2001, I would have been subject to discipline, even removal, by the
Commission on Judicial Conduct. Some members of that commission and its
staff have even gone so far as to state that accepting the nomination
of the Right to Life Party is judicial misconduct.... After I became a
county-level judge, the death penalty was restored in this state. As a
cross-assigned judge I was offered the opportunity to take special training
that would allow me to sit on capital cases. I declined, and wondered
what I would do if such assignments became mandatory. Most of us dont
give a lot of thought to the death penalty. I never did, truthfully. But
when faced with the real possibility that you might someday decide who
lives and who dies, youd sure better start thinking about it. I
likely would have ended up as one of those who should have resigned rather
than follow the law. But would I have? I believe in the sanctity of human
life from birth to natural death. Its such an easy thing to say.
Now.

But
Seriously, Folks (Larry Miller)
But, you see in all of American life there has, for a long time,
been a battle of sorts to define what is serious and what is not, and
all the wrong people are consistently winning. No matter how stupid, wrongheaded,
or immoral some of our leaders and representatives have been over the
years, if they can affect an appearance of troubled thoughtfulness when
they address our problems, if they speak in a measured way, if they look
around and nod with gravity, and if they use coy, calculated gestures
 biting a lower lip, say  they will always be considered serious
people, and theres no telling how far they can go. And I just dont
get it. P.J. ORourke has created some of the most immensely funny
things in the history of immensely funny things, and I consider his work
to be wise, large, insightful, and practical; in short, serious. The problem
for me, you see, is that I dont know what to call the serious
people of today, because I dont think they are. When Mr. Daschle
holds forth on our war effort, everyone thinks hes serious, he certainly
thinks hes serious, but all I see behind those unblinking blue eyes
is a man thinking, Boy, I sure would look good stepping off that
big, green helicopter and saluting. The support Messrs.
Daschle, Leahy, Biden, et al. have given to our war effort has the same
sincerity of the wrestling bad guy who spends two minutes gouging the
face of his opponent with an awl and then, when confronted by the referee,
slips the iron into his shorts and holds up his hands like a Vegas dealer
going on his break.

The
1930s, Again: A hard rain is going to fall. (Victor Davis Hanson)
And so we Americans, like those 70 years ago who so wanted a perpetual
peace, pray for a return of sanity in the Middle East. We chose to ignore
horrific stories of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia  the embryo of 9/11.
We are more amused than shocked that madrassas have taught a
generation to hate us. When mullahs in Iran speak of destroying Israel
we wince, but also shrug. We want to see no real connection between madmen
blowing themselves up to kill us in New York and the like-minded doing
the same in Tel-Aviv. We put our trust in peace with a killer like Mr.
Arafat, who packs a gun and whips up volatile crowds in Arabic. All the
while, no American statesman has the guts to tell the Arab leadership
that statism, tribalism, fundamentalism, gender apartheid, and autocracy
 not America, not Israel  make their people poor, angry, and
dangerous.... I dont listen any more to the apologies and prevarications
of our whiney university Arabists, our equivocators in the state department,
and the really tawdry assortment of oil men, D.C. insiders, bought and
paid for PR suits, and weapons hucksters. The truth is that a large minority
of the Middle Eastern world wishes a war with America that it cannot win
 and much of the rest is apparently either indifferent or amused.
So we should stop apologizing, prepare for the worst, hope for the best,
and accept this animosity  just as our forefathers once did when
faced by similar autocrats and their captive peoples who threatened us
in 1941.

New
Analysis Says Womens Studies Prism Emits a Distinctly Feminist Coloring
(FOXNews)
The modern woman is plagued by stereotypes imposed by a male-dominated
society, which keeps her relegated to rearing children, keeping home and
working in low-paying, menial jobs. That is the universal claim found
in womens studies textbooks on college campuses today, according
to a critical analysis by the Independent Womens Forum, a womens
group that has often tangled with the traditional feminist establishment.
The treatise, set forth by Christine Stolba, a senior fellow at IWF, has
already drawn fire from scholars who see Stolba as an ultra-conservative
with an ax to grind against traditional feminists.... She said many of
the textbooks ignore the advances women have made in order to push an
anti-male, liberal agenda that is rooted more in the stone age of gender
relations than in 21st-century culture. It is a truth universally
acknowledged in womens studies textbooks that women have been and
continue to be the victims of oppression, wrote Stolba. Womens
studies textbooks support a large number of factual inaccuracies. Many
of these are deliberately misleading sisterly sophistries.

Added April 8, 2002

Keyes
challenge: Return nation to principles (Pensacola News Journal)
The people of faith in America bear a special burden to return the
nation to its founding principles, Ambassador Alan Keyes told a crowd
Friday in Pensacola. God Bless America? Yes, but I keep hearing
the question, Keyes said. Why? Afghanistan terrorist
Osama bin Laden did not introduce America to evil on Sept. 11, he said.
Dont think you can escape responsibility for your own.
The moral challenge is simple, he said: Cease to do evil, and learn
to do good. .... We do not stand on the same ground the nation
was founded on. We do not stand on the same principles the countrys
strength was built on, Keyes said. It reminds me of the old
cartoons we used to see when I was a kid. Roadrunner would get halfway
across the abyss, and he would suddenly realize where he was. I sadly
believe that in one respect, thats where we are in terms of our
freedom. Theres nothing underneath us anymore. .... We
have made the name of God obscene in our public schools. In ancient Greece,
obscene was something you could not show in public. The name of God has
been an obscenity in our government-run schools for the last 30 or 40
years. Dont say it, dont show it, dont speak it. Thats
all been run out by this auspicious principle of separation (of church
and state) they're always telling us about.... The most terrible
departure... is the fact that we have embraced an understanding of our
rights that now encompasses the lie that the most fundamental right 
which is the right to live at all  is not a matter of Gods
will, but of human choice. In the Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme
Court told us the right to life for each human being... comes from human
choice. How do we think we can have it both ways? I dont understand
this contradiction. It cant be Gods choice and my choice,
too.

What
Hollings Bill Would Do (Wired News)
If Hollywood and the music industry get their way, new software
and hardware will sport embedded copy protection technology. A bill introduced
by Senate Commerce Chairman Fritz Hollings would prohibit the sale or
distribution of nearly any technology  unless it features copy-protection
standards to be set by the federal government.... Anyone selling 
or creating and distributing  digital media devices
may not do so unless they include government-approved security standards....
It would be unlawful to import software or hardware without government-approved
security standards.... Network-connected computer systems may not delete
markers indicating a file is copy-protected. Knowingly removing copy-protection
markers from digital content is prohibited.... It would be unlawful to
knowingly distribute or send someone any digital content that has been
purged of its this-is-copy-protected marker.... One part of the bill overrides
a landmark lawsuit that said the Rio MP3 player did not violate copyright
law.

Frances
Bloody Hands (NYP)
France is hardly in a position to lecture the United States about
justice, the death penalty or civil rights. The last time that France
was involved in a major terrorist campaign, in Algeria from 1954-62, French
security forces routinely tortured rebel suspects  while murdering
uncounted thousands in summary executions. Only recently, retired French
Army Gen. Paul Aussaresses published a sensational memoir calmy recounting
his own role in these atrocities, which were carried out with the approval
of French government figures  such as future President Francois
Mitterand. Even today, the French criminal justice system is so weighted
against defendants that the accused is practically guilty until proven
innocent.... In any case, its one thing for France  which
has officially abolished the death penalty at home  to register
its unhappiness at the prospect of Moussaouis execution, but its
quite another for this ally to threaten non-cooperation with
the Sept. 11 investigation. It is early in this war against terror, but
you can be sure the United States will not forget the countries which
stood beside her. And those that let her down.

Religious
leaders waste their energy (Bill Wineke)
The question I have this morning is whether Jesus Christ went to
the cross to encourage us to drive Saturns. Because Sunday is Palm Sunday,
the first day of the Christian season of Holy Week, I dont think
thats an impertinent question. Yet, I have on my desk a letter signed
by 48 Wisconsin Religious leaders telling me that God wants
sport utility vehicles to get better gas mileage and Im asking myself,
why does the church keep doing this? .... Among other conservation
measures, the letter calls on the senators to support policies to raise
substantially vehicle fuel economy across the board in the shortest feasible
timeframe, and require SUVs, minivans and passenger cars to meet the same
standard. But the letter doesnt stop there. It also calls
for more investment in wind, geothermal and biomass technologies, regulation
of carbon dioxide emissions and greater energy efficiency. It is signed
by leaders from liberal Protestant, Jewish, Roman Catholic and, even,
Zen religious bodies. For whatever its worth, I agree with most
of the ideas expressed in the letter. What I dont understand, again,
is why religious leaders are issuing such exhortations in the name of
God.

Saudi
newspaper editor apologizes for Purim blood libel (Jerusalem
Post)
A Saudi Arabian newspaper editor yesterday issued a backhanded apology
for a column published last week which resurrected the medieval blood
libel against Jews by claiming they use the blood of Christian or Muslim
mature adolescents to prepare special Purim pastries. Al-Riyadh
editor-in-chief Turki al-Sudairi wrote that the article, written by Umayma
Ahmed al-Jalahma of King Faisal University, was not fit to print.
The paper had been sharply criticized by the US government before Al-Riyadh
published the apology. On Monday, the Voice of America aired an editorial
praising Saudi Arabia for its peace initiative, but criticizing it for
not doing more to reduce Israel-Arab tensions. In the meantime,
said VOA, there is something that Saudi Arabia and other countries
could do right now to ease tensions in the Middle East. They could stop
newspapers and radio and television stations, especially those controlled
by the state, from inciting hatred and violence against Jews.

The
fundamentalist question (Josie Appleton)
So why did radical Islam begin to emerge in the West in the 1990s?
The emergence cannot be explained by the strength of the doctrine of radical
Islam. Rather, the reasons some young Muslim men began to be gripped by
anti-Western religious dogma should be sought in changes within Western
society. The key factor in the rise of fundamentalism in the West was
the end of the Cold War in 1989. This effectively unfroze politics 
dissolving the left-right axis that had structured political and social
identities for much of the twentieth century. With the collapse of the
left, the right could no longer sustain its coherence  and in Europe
and the USA, right-wing governments tumbled. Society was left increasingly
atomised and directionless. This malaise was compounded by the erosion
of long-standing institutions which had helped tie individuals into society,
including the family, the church, the monarchy and civic organisations.
The ideology of Islamic fundamentalism grew stronger in this vacuum left
by the end of the Cold War. Where post-Cold War politics seemed uncertain
and unconfident, Islamic fundamentalism promised firm rules, a coherent
sense of identity, and a sense of belonging to a global Islamic community.

Epidemic
of fear (Frank Furedi)
Since 11 September, speculating about risk is represented as sound
risk management. The aftermath of 11 September has given legitimacy to
the principle of precaution, with risk increasingly seen as something
you suffer from, rather than something you manage. Of course, taking sensible
precautions makes a lot of sense. But continually imagining the worst
possible outcome is not an effective way to deal with problems. Allowing
speculation to dominate how we think about risks may even distract us
from tackling the everyday problems and hazards that confront society.
We dont need any more Hollywood-style brainstorming. We need a grown-up
discussion about our post-11 September world, based on a reasoned evaluation
of all the available evidence rather than on irrational fears for the
future.

The
Social Psychology of Modern Slavery (SciAm)
To many people, it comes as a surprise that debt bondage and other
forms of slavery persist into the 21st century. Every country, after all,
has made it illegal to own and exercise total control over another human
being. And yet there are people like Baldev who remain enslaved 
by my estimate, which is based on a compilation of reports from governments
and nongovernmental organizations, perhaps 27 million of them around the
world. If slaveholders no longer own slaves in a legal sense, how can
they still exercise so much control that freed slaves sometimes deliver
themselves back into bondage? This is just one of the puzzles that make
slavery the greatest challenge faced by the social sciences today. Despite
being among the oldest and most persistent forms of human relationships,
found in most societies at one time or another, slavery is little understood.
Although historians have built up a sizable literature on antebellum American
slavery, other types have barely been studied.... Human trafficking 
the involuntary smuggling of people between countries, often by organized
crime  has become a huge concern, especially in Europe and Southeast
Asia. Many people, lured by economic opportunities, pay smugglers to slip
them across borders but then find themselves sold to sweatshops, brothels
or domestic service to pay for their passage; others are kidnapped and
smuggled against their will. In certain areas, notably Brazil and West
Africa, laborers have been enticed into signing contracts and then taken
to remote plantations and prevented from leaving. In parts of South Asia
and North Africa, slavery is a millennia-old tradition that has never
truly ended.

The
Social Life of Paper (Malcolm Gladwell)
Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasnt
happened. Every country in the Western world uses more paper today, on
a per-capita basis, than it did ten years ago. The consumption of uncoated
free-sheet paper, for instance  the most common kind of office paper
 rose almost fifteen per cent in the United States between 1995
and 2000. This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate
old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies
offered by computerization. A number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics
experts, however, dont agree. Paper has persisted, they argue, for
very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive
tasks, paper has many advantages over computers. The dismay people feel
at the sight of a messy desk  or the spectacle of air-traffic controllers
tracking flights through notes scribbled on paper strips  arises
from a fundamental confusion about the role that paper plays in our lives.

Propaganda
at its best (Cal Thomas)
Last week, ABC News allowed entertainer Rosie ODonnell to
take over two hours of airtime for a one-sided infomercial promoting gay
adoptions. All of the elements required for breaking down what few
social norms remain regarding the family structure were present on Primetime
Thursday. First, the celebrity factor. In our postmodern, post Christian,
post objective truth generation, celebrity equals credibility. Celebrities
have replaced God. When they speak, some people think the rest of us should
listen.... Rosie is right because she says so. She says President and
Laura Bush are wrong when they say that the ideal setting for a child
is in a home with a mother and father. End of discussion. The celebrity
goddess has spoken.... There are credible scientific, legal and religious
arguments against gay adoptions. ABC didnt present them
because if they had, Rosie ODonnell would not have appeared on Primetime
Thursday. This was journalism at its worst but propaganda at its
best.

They
Died for Lack of a Head Scarf (Mona Eltahawy)
The fire was a tragedy that could have struck anywhere. Fifteen
girls between ages 13 and 17 were trampled to death and 52 others were
hurt when a blaze swept through their school.... Firefighters told the
Saudi press that morality police forced girls to stay inside the burning
building because they were not wearing the head scarves and black cloaks
known as abayas that women must wear in public in that kingdom. One Saudi
paper said the morality police stopped men who tried to help the girls
escape the building, saying, It is sinful to approach them.
Girls died because zealots at the gate would rather see them burn than
appear in public dressed inappropriately.... What kind of virtue is it
to allow girls to die in a fire because of what they were not wearing?
Whose Islam is it that allows these men to dilute the faith I and millions
of others cherish for its teachings of compassion and justice to nothing
more than a dress code and sexual segregation? I grew up learning God
is merciful and that faith was based on choice  you could not force
actions on anyone in the name of religion.

Zero
tolerance means educators cannot practice what they teach (Dave Lieber)
I keep waiting for Rod Serling to pop out in the story of L.D. Bell
High School student Taylor Hess and tell us it is another episode from
his old television show, The Twilight Zone. Hess was expelled from school
because his grandmothers bread knife was found in his pickup parked
on school property.... What theyre trying to do is incomprehensible,
Robert Hess, Taylors father, told me. I just cant believe
it. Zero tolerance doesnt mean zero brains. You have to use your
judgment. .... This is so sad, what our public education system
has been reduced to, as administrators and teachers try to cope with the
very real threat of student violence. We have taken away from them the
very concepts that we try to teach our children. We have removed their
ability to use their own good judgment, their reasoning powers and their
ability to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. If justice is not examined
on a case-by-case basis, then it is not true justice.

Youre
the Doctor: Whats as Easy as ABC? Only a Little Farther Up the Alphabet?
A PhD. (WP)
These days, PhDs are like opinions and pie holes  pretty much
everybodys got one. You can earn a PhD: in human nutrition at Michigan
State University; in social work at the University of Texas; in recreational
studies at the University of Florida; in family studies at the University
of New Mexico; and in fashion merchandising at Texas Womens University.
A candidate for a PhD in creative writing at the University of Georgia
can submit poems instead of a dissertation. At the University of Michigan
you can get a PhD in literature without reading Shakespeare.... In fact,
all kinds of people are picking up PhDs. This year about 42,000 people
will earn doctorates in the United States, according to the University
of Chicagos National Opinion Research Center, which conducts research
for the National Science Foundation and five other federal agencies. Most
striking is a trend toward more PhDs in the humanities  up more
than 11 percent between 1999 and 2000.... Candidates in the past were
required to possess a breadth of knowledge bearing on a given subject.
Often they had to study additional languages. And their labor  which
usually took years of intense study in required courses  was subject
to review by outside scholars. In many cases, the requirements have been
eased.

Mein
Kampf for sale, in Arabic (London Telegraph)
An Arabic translation of Hitlers Mein Kampf which
has become a bestseller in the Palestinian territories is now on sale
in Britain. The book, Hitlers account of his life and anti-Semitic
ideology written while he was in prison in the 1920s, is normally found
in Britain in academic or political bookshops. But The Telegraph found
it on sale in three newsagents on Edgware Road, central London, an area
with a large Arab population.... Copies of the translation are understood
to have been distributed to London shops towards the end of last year
and have been selling well. In the preface, Luis al-Haj, the translator,
states: National Socialism did not die with the death of its herald.
Rather, its seeds multiplied under each star. The book was on sale
alongside newspapers, magazines, cigarettes and sweets at a newsagents
kiosk.

Web
Critics Take Aim at Old-Style Publishers (FOXNews)
A small but growing contingent of amateur and semi-professional
media critics are taking aim at newspapers and periodicals, picking up
where those papers ombudsmen (if they have them) leave off. One
of the first to appear was SmarterTimes.com, a site that painstakingly
points out flaws in The New York Times. Since then, similar sights have
cropped up that skewer the Los Angeles Times (LAExaminer.com) and the
San Francisco Chronicle (Chronwatch.com).

Added April 1, 2002

The
Suicide of the Palestinians (David Gelernter)
We ought to face squarely the origins of the Palestinian descent
into barbarism. In July 2000, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak made a
peace offer that stunned Israel and the world: Israel would re-divide
Jerusalem  would turn over large pieces of its ancient capital to
the same people who had destroyed its synagogues, desecrated its cemeteries,
and banned Jews from entering when they last ran the show. Arafat rejected
the offer. Then in September 2000 the new wave of murderous violence began,
supposedly triggered by Ariel Sharons visit to the Temple Mount....
Everyone knows about Munich, September 1938: Britain and France generously
donate a big slice of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, in exchange for peace
with honor, peace in our time, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Many people know about the Kristallnacht pogrom, November 1938: Germanys
approach to the Jews turns from mere oppression to bloodthirsty violence.
Kristallnacht was triggered by the murder of a German diplomat
by a deranged Jew. But some (not all) historians point out the obvious:
A leading cause of Kristallnacht was Munich itself. Hitler read the Munich
agreements as a proclamation by England and France stating: We are
weak; you have nothing to fear; do what you like. The analogy is
not close, just close enough. Israel is no Czechoslovakia and was not
sold down the river. Barak made his offer freely and in good faith. But
to a significant number of Palestinians, the offer obviously said: We
are weak; you have nothing to fear; attack. Appeasement doesnt
merely fail to prevent catastrophe, it provokes catastrophe.

A
Peace of My Mind (Dave Shiflett)
Have you slapped a pacifist today? If not, get to it. Its
one thing to protest a war undertaken in some remote jungle you have to
take a long flight to, and whose purposes may be a bit gauzy. Its
quite another when the enemy is dive-bombing New York and Washington.
The fact that our enemies are determined to return the world to the seventh
century and force our women to dress in sacks makes the anti-war position
all the more controversial. There seems little choice but to douse these
people with the hot oil of ridicule. At the outset, it should be pointed
out that these contemporary pacifists are not cut from the same cloth
as historys grand Mahatmas, whose neutrality may have sometimes
been in error but who were people of large and often courageous spirit....
Not so the new breed, which appears to be largely made up of self-absorbed
snots. When the heat shows up, they run. If they get jugged, they get
someone to post bail, preferably on Daddys AmEx card. Some do a
bit of car-burning and looting on the side. They blossom most brilliantly
in the spotlight, which they are forever seeking, and they hail from the
expected provinces: Hollywood, the Ivy League, the Ivory Tower, Trust
Fund City. Many hold dual citizenship.

Study:
Death penalty deters scores of killings (Paul Rubin)
Executions are always controversial, and there are always debates
about whether states should use the death penalty. But this debate cannot
proceed rationally unless we fully understand the advantages and disadvantages
of execution.... One conservative version of our model finds that each
execution deters an average of 18 homicides, with a range of between 8
and 28 murders deterred by each execution. Other variants find even larger
numbers of prevented murders.... We as a society might decide that we
want to eliminate capital punishment. But this should be an informed decision,
and should consider both the costs and benefits of executions. Our evidence
is that there are substantial benefits from executions and, thus, substantial
costs of changing this policy.

Minoritarianism:
A dangerous obsession (John Derbyshire)
In a civilized liberal democracy, majorities owe certain things
to harmless minorities: tolerance, civility, and the rights granted in
the Constitution  freedom of speech, assembly, etc. However, it
seems to me that minorities owe something to the majority in return: mainly,
a proper respect for their tastes, beliefs, and sensibilities, and a decent
restraint in challenging them, if there are some reasonable grounds for
challenging them. This contract imposes some costs on minorities, of course,
but I think they should look on those costs as the price of the tolerance
they enjoy. Is that patronizing? Well, then add being patronized
to the list of costs  none of which, in any case I can think of
in American society today, is much more arduous or oppressive than that.
There are, after all, reciprocal costs on the majority when they make
those accommodations.... I dont see any danger at all that majorities
will ride roughshod over minorities unless restrained by wise, omniscient
elites. I do, though, see the opposite danger: That by allowing themselves
to be browbeaten by those elites into yielding on every single point of
accommodation demanded by every loud minority, the majority will find
at last that they have no institutions, no traditions, no moral landmarks,
no common understandings left, and will be adrift in a wasteland of moral
relativism, naked to the cold, heartless winds of intellectual fashion.

Can
There Be a Decent Left? (Michael Walzer)
A few left academics have tried to figure out how many civilians
actually died in Afghanistan, aiming at as high a figure as possible,
on the assumption, apparently, that if the number is greater than the
number of people killed in the Towers, the war is unjust. At the moment,
most of the numbers are propaganda; there is no reliable accounting. But
the claim that the numbers matter in just this way, that the 3120th death
determines the injustice of the war, is in any case wrong. It denies one
of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated
murder and unintended killing. And the denial isnt accidental, as
if the people making it just forgot about, or didnt know about,
the everyday moral world. The denial is willful: unintended killing by
Americans in Afghanistan counts as murder. This cant be true anywhere
else, for anybody else.

The
man who knows too much (Jonathan Tobin)
CNN reporter Steve Emerson was stuck in Oklahoma City on Christmas
1992 with nothing to do and wandered by the citys Convention Center,
where a gathering of the Muslim Arab Youth Association was taking place.
Inside, he found books preaching Islamic Jihad, books calling for
the extermination of Jews and Christians, even coloring books instructing
children on subjects, such as How to Kill the Infidel.
Later, after listening to speeches urging jihad against the Jews and the
West from luminaries such as the head of the Hamas terrorist group, Emerson
called his contacts in the FBI to inquire whether they were aware of this
bizarre meeting in the American heartland. They were not. A year later,
Emerson attended a similar Muslim conference in Detroit that included
representatives from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terror
groups. It also included an appearance from a befuddled senior FBI agent.
When a member of the hostile audience asked the agent for advice on how
to ship weapons overseas, Emerson relates that the G-man said, matter-of-factly,
that he hoped any such efforts would be done in conformance with
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms guidelines. Apparently,
the FBI official had attended the radical conference under the mistaken
impression that it was some kind of Rotary Club.

The
Core of Muslim Rage (Thomas Friedman)
It has to do with the contrast between Islams self-perception
as the most ideal and complete expression of the three great monotheistic
religions  Judaism, Christianity and Islam  and the conditions
of poverty, repression and underdevelopment in which most Muslims live
today. As a U.S. diplomat in the Middle East said to me, Israel 
not Iraq, not India  is a constant reminder to Muslims of
their own powerlessness. How could a tiny Jewish state amass so
much military and economic power if the Islamic way of life  not
Christianity or Judaism  is Gods most ideal religious path?
When Hindus kill Muslims its not a story, because there are a billion
Hindus and they arent part of the Muslim narrative. When Saddam
murders his own people its not a story, because its in the
Arab-Muslim family. But when a small band of Israeli Jews kills Muslims
it sparks rage  a rage that must come from Muslims having to confront
the gap between their self-perception as Muslims and the reality of the
Muslim world.

Special
Dispatch No. 354: Saudi Government Daily: Jews Use Teenagers Blood
for Purim Pastries (MEMRI)
In an article published by the Saudi government daily Al-Riyadh,
columnist Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faysal University in Al-Dammam,
wrote on The Jewish Holiday of Purim. Following are excerpts
of the article: This holiday has some dangerous customs that will,
no doubt, horrify you, and I apologize if any reader is harmed because
of this.... For this holiday, the Jewish people must obtain human blood
so that their clerics can prepare the holiday pastries. In other words,
the practice cannot be carried out as required if human blood is not spilled!!....
For this holiday, the victim must be a mature adolescent who is, of course,
a non-Jew  that is, a Christian or a Muslim. His blood is taken
and dried into granules. The cleric blends these granules into the pastry
dough; they can also be saved for the next holiday. In contrast, for the
Passover slaughtering, about which I intend to write one of these days,
the blood of Christian and Muslim children under the age of 10 must be
used, and the cleric can mix the blood [into the dough] before or after
dehydration....

The
Crescent and the Gun (Brian Saint-Paul)
The problem, then, is not in the Koran itself but in those who are
free to twist it. Because theres no one to interpret the book authoritatively,
its vulnerable to any charismatic leader willing to abuse it to
justify his personal hatred. The sad result is clear for all to see: The
Korans command not to harm civilians is ignored; its prohibition
against suicide is interpreted away by suicide bombers; its call for freedom
in worship is cast aside in many Islamic states; its order to stand up
for the oppressed is ignored by those too afraid to speak out against
the persecution of non-Muslims. Islam has the Koran, but the Koran has
no interpreter. An analogous situation is in Protestant Christianity,
where the inheritors of the Reformation gather around the call of sola
scriptura (Scripture alone). Different Protestant denominations read the
Bible in different ways, with no single, authoritative interpreter. Why
then dont we see fringe Protestants strapping bombs around their
waists and walking into crowded malls? The answer brings us back to the
different concepts of justice. In Islam, following the Old Testament model,
the attacker can be justly destroyed. In Christianity, following the just-war
theory, the attacker must be repelled  but only in proportion to
the attack. Ultimately, the violence perpetrated by Muslim fringe groups
has two roots: first, the Korans command to fight the oppressor,
and second, the lack of a single voice to identify who that oppressor
is. Without that authority, any group  any people, any nation 
can be considered an oppressor by those who feel theyve been wronged.
The result, too often, is bloodshed.

Spying:
The American Way of Life? (Wired News)
In the six months since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans may not
have exactly embraced a surveillance society, but they appear to have
grown to accept portions of it. A Zogby poll conducted last December says
that 80 percent of respondents favored video monitoring on public places
such as street corners. Especially in the dark days after the Pentagon
was hit, the White House targeted, the Capitol anthraxed, and the World
Trade Center leveled, that public reaction was predictable. In national
emergencies, the uneasy relationship between freedom and order edges toward
greater restrictions on individual liberty. But Bushs war on terror
is not a traditional military conflict with a clear end that can be met
after, say, U.S. soldiers capture a city, eliminate a Taliban command
post  or even snare Osama bin Laden himself. Bush and other top
administration officials repeatedly have warned that the attempt to exterminate
al-Qaida dens may continue for years, even decades. It conceivably could
succeed the Cold War as the most important political struggle of the 21st
century. If that happens, new surveillance powers that police receive
today likely will become permanent.

Profs
Do Better on Shorter Leash, Study Concludes (NewsMax)
Tenured college professors might be bad teachers and even worse
scholars, but their institutions and peers have little ability to influence
their conduct, according to a recent study by The Fraser Institute, a
libertarian think tank in Vancouver, British Columbia. To improve the
quality of their teaching, professors need incentives, something radically
nonexistent in the individualistic culture of the North American university,
write Rodney Clifton and Hymie Rubenstein in Collegial Models for
Enhancing the Performance of University Professors. Often when professors
receive tenure they neglect their students and focus on research or outside
assignments like consulting businesses, Clifton and Rubenstein write.
The sheer number of extraneous commitments may cause professors to view
students as nuisances rather than the paying consumers they are, according
to the authors.

Whooping
It Up: In Beirut, even Christians celebrated the atrocity (Italian journalist
Elisabetta Burba)
Where were you on Sept. 11, when terrorists changed the world? I
was at the National Museum here [in Beirut], enjoying the wonders of the
ancient Phoenicians with my husband. This tour of past splendor only magnified
the shock I received later when I heard the news and saw the reactions
all around me. Walking downtown, I realized that the offspring of this
great civilization were celebrating a terrorist outrage. And I am not
talking about destitute people. Those who were cheering belonged to the
elite of the Paris of Middle East: professionals wearing double-breasted
suits, charming blond ladies, pretty teenagers in tailored jeans. Trying
to find our bearings, my husband and I went into an American-style cafe
in the Hamra district, near Rue Verdun, rated as one of the most expensive
shopping streets in the world. Here the cognitive dissonance was immediate,
and direct. The cafes sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing,
cheering and making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi.
Nobody looked shocked, or moved. They were excited, very excited.... Back
in Italy, I received a phone call from my friend Gilberto Bazoli, a journalist
in Cremona. He told me he witnessed the same reactions among Muslims in
the local mosque of that small Lombard city. They were all on Osama
bin Ladens side, he said. One of them told me that they
were not even worthy to kiss his toes.

Anti-Americanism
blamed on college teachers (WT)
Professors and administrators are to blame for anti-American sentiment
on college campuses today, according to a report by the American Council
of Trustees and Alumni. More than 140 college campuses in 36 states have
held anti-war rallies denouncing the countrys military actions in
Afghanistan, the report says. The document  Defending Civilization:
How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It
 concludes that many professors and administrators are quick to
clamp down on acts of patriotism, such as flying the American flag, and
look down on students who question professors politically
correct ideas in class.

In
war, grownups cant play silly games (Mark Steyn)
But the six-month suspension of normal politics is taking its toll
on Democrats. We seem to be good at developing entrance strategies,
Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginias porkmeister par excellence,
whined the other day, and not so good at developing exit strategies.
Well spotted, senator. Heres something else that will shock you:
Churchill didnt have an exit strategy for World War
II.... You dont have exit strategies when your national territorys
been attacked; you have a responsibility to see the war through to the
end.... The headline on Jules Witcovers column in the Baltimore
Sun read, Democrats Ask Tough Questions On War. In fact, tough
questions would be welcome. But Byrds and Senate Majority Leader
Tom Daschles criticisms are pathetic: Theyre about spin, posturing,
about how itll play on TV. In war, grownups dont have time
for silly games in the congressional schoolyard.

Being
reasonable about faith when we all ignore God (Hanna Clark)
This fact versus faith dichotomy relies on a gendered and racialized
conception of the human mind and soul (or are they even separate?). White
people are seen as rational and logical, living in the world of logic
and ideas. People of color are seen as more spiritual, irrational and
emotional. The same can be said of men (theyre rational) and women
(theyre irrational). And the same can be said of Macalester atheists
(rational) and the rest of us (irrational). The problem is that Atheism
is just as based on faith as any other religion. At Macalester, religion
is often seen only as an institution that tries to exert control. Theres
a knee-jerk reaction to the imposition of rules and social mores, and
all religion and spirituality is thereby ridiculed. Its ironic that
so many people use a patriarchal and racist ideology to critique what
they think is an engine of oppressive authority.

The
Pristine Myth (Katie Bacon interviews Charles Mann)
For years the standard view of North America before Columbuss
arrival was as a vast, grassy expanse teeming with game and all but empty
of people. Those who did live here were nomads who left few marks on the
land. South America, too, or at least the Amazon rain forest, was thought
of as almost an untouched Eden, now suffering from modern depredations.
But a growing number of anthropologists and archaeologists now believe
that this picture is almost completely false. According to this school
of thought, the Western Hemisphere before Columbuss arrival was
well-populated and dotted with impressive cities and towns  one
scholar estimated that it held ninety to 112 million people, more than
lived in Europe at the time  and Indians had transformed vast swaths
of landscape to meet their agricultural needs. They used fire to create
the Midwestern prairie, perfect for herds of buffalo. They also cultivated
at least part of the rain forest, living on crops of fruits and nuts.

Diagnosis:
Delusional (Drs. Michael A. Glueck & Robert J. Cihak)
People need to feel right about themselves. Not just good 
right. Morally right. For some people, hating America provides an inexhaustible
source of unearned moral stature. They cant be right unless their
country is wrong, always and forever wrong: an attitude empowered by the
quaint notion that dissent is somehow automatically morally superior to
consent, and refusal to participate a greater good than support. Sadly,
there is much in this country to criticize. Were far from perfect,
and in many ways the intensity of our self-scrutiny stands as a badge
of our virtue. But there comes a time when some overweening emergency
takes precedence.

Correctness
Crack-Up (Stephen Goode and Christopher Jolma)
But the response to Sept. 11 at U.S. colleges and universities might
be bringing about a bigger, more profound transformation thats now
in its earliest stages. Its change that challenges and may undermine
 the gospel of political correctness, which has ravaged U.S. schools
for nearly two decades. Its a transformation, too, that may bring
an end to the power held at American universities and colleges by the
left-wing 1960s activists  many of whom long have held senior and
tenured positions at American schools and have used those positions to
preach the same tired left-wing politics and anti-Americanism they began
so loudly advocating 40 years ago.

Campus
Capers (David Horowitz)
In any case, the media blackout of my book makes my current campus
speaking tour something of a necessity. I have one additional agenda,
moreover, which is to cast a spotlight on the rampant political bias in
the hiring of faculty at American universities. This repression of conservative
viewpoints  an academic McCarthyism that puts McCarthys puny
efforts to shame  is blatant, unconstitutional and illegal, but
ubiquitous nonetheless.

What
will it take to persuade? (Balint Vazsonyi)
The brutal murder of journalist Daniel Pearl has shaken even our
own television news analysts. That is significant, since some of our most
highly visible  and highly paid  commentators had never known
a foreign terrorist they didnt like. Well, that might be a bit harsh.
Let us say instead, they had never seen a foreign terrorist whose cause
they didnt respect. But this was too much, even for them. Are we
mad enough yet?

How
The Left Undermined Americas Security (David Horowitz)
Underlying the Clinton security failure was the fact that the Administration
was made up of people who for twenty-five years had discounted or minimized
the totalitarian threat, opposed Americas armed presence abroad,
and consistently resisted the deployment of Americas military forces
to halt Communist expansion. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was
himself a veteran of the Sixties anti-war movement, which
abetted the Communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia, and created the
Vietnam War syndrome that made it so difficult afterwards
for American presidents to deploy the nations military forces.

The
cost of academic integrity (Walter Williams)
College budgets depend on admitting warm bodies. That means we cant
expect college administrators to do anything to stop unprepared students
from being admitted, courses dumbed-down and fraudulent grades given.
Boards of Trustees tend to be yes-men and women for the president, so
we cant expect anything from them. The money spigot needs to be
turned off. Alumni, foundations and other charitable donors  not
to mention taxpayers  should be made aware of fraudulent practices
and academic dishonesty.

The
Plains vs. The Atlantic: Is Middle America a backwater, or a reservoir?
(Blake Hurst)
The combination of progressive taxation and urban real-estate prices
ensures that almost nobody on the coasts has more spendable income than
the highest paid people in Franklin County or the rest of rural Red America.
People here in Missouris small towns can buy a beautiful older home
for less than $100,000. Brooks makes much of the fact that he literally
could not spend more than $20 for a meal in Franklin County. The fare
in Red America is a bit limited. You cant buy one of those meals
with a dime-sized entrée in the middle of a huge plate, with some
sort of sauce artfully squirted about. But you can buy a pound of prime
rib for ten bucks. Class-consciousness isnt a problem in Red America,
because most people can afford to buy everything thats for sale.

Proof
that the classics speak to everyone (Katherine Kersten)
For 35 years now, weve been hearing that the classics
 the great books of the Western world  are largely irrelevant
in todays classrooms. Why? Most were written by dead white males.
Obviously, then, they can hold little meaning for females or for black
or Hispanic kids. Everyone knows that if young people are to be moved
or inspired, they need books whose authors look like them.
Try telling that to the students at Wilbur Wright College, a two-year
community college in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago. Students
at Wright are predominantly black, Hispanic or from immigrant families.
Wright is for kids who arent ready for four-year colleges. Yet students
there are flocking to a Great Books program and lining up to read authors
like Plato, Cicero and Dante.

Why
the Muslims Misjudged Us (Victor Hanson)
Two striking themes  one overt, one implied  characterize
most Arab invective: first, there is some sort of equivalence  political,
cultural, and military  between the West and the Muslim world; and
second, America has been exceptionally unkind toward the Middle East.
Both premises are false and reveal that the temple of anti-Americanism
is supported by pillars of utter ignorance.

Parsing
out grammar (Linda Chavez)
I learned how to diagram sentences in elementary school  or
what we used to call, appropriately, grammar school.... Progressive teachers
and their professional associations, especially the National Council of
Teachers of English (NCTE), believe diagramming sentences is make-work
that bores students and turns them off to writing. So they banished diagramming
from the classroom years ago, along with most grammar instruction. 

The
Education of Abraham Lincoln (Eric Foner)
He read incessantly, beginning as a youth with the Bible and Shakespeare.
During his single term in the House of Representatives, his colleagues
considered it humorous that Lincoln spent his spare time poring over books
in the Library of Congress. The result of this stunning work of
self-education was the intellectual power revealed in
Lincolns writings and speeches.

Lost
Boys (Amy Benfer)
Suddenly, the debate among researchers is focused on the boys: Are
they behind because of the girl empowerment movement? Are they being shortchanged
in the classroom simply because they are boys?

Why
We Don’t Marry (James Q. Wilson)“Marriage was once a sacrament, then it became a contract, and now
it is an arrangement. Once religion provided the sacrament, then the law
enforced the contract, and now personal preferences define the arrangement.”

Added March 18, 2002

Faith
and Diversity in American Religion (Alan Wolfe)
No aspect of life is considered so important to Americans outside
higher education, yet deemed so unimportant by the majority of those inside,
as religion. The relative indifference to religion in higher education
may be changing, however, as a wide variety of social and intellectual
trends converge.

The
Trouble With Self-Esteem (Lauren Slater)
There is absolutely no evidence that low self-esteem is particularly
harmful, Emler says. Its not at all a cause of poor
academic performance; people with low self-esteem seem to do just as well
in life as people with high self-esteem. In fact, they may do better,
because they often try harder.

Managing
Us: Were So Easy (Fred Reed)
First, people will watch any television rather than no television.
Second, sooner or later they will begin to imitate what they see on the
screen. Third, while you cant fool all of the people all of the
time, you can fool enough of them enough of the time, especially if you
are a lot smarter than they are, and do it patiently, calculatedly, over
time, like water eroding stone. And that is all it takes.

Wrong
Turn (Roger Kimball)
The most delicious news to emerge from the art world this year [2001]
came in October, courtesy of the BBC. Under the gratifying headline Cleaner
Dumps Hirst Installation, the world read that A cleaner at
a London gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst having
mistaken it for rubbish. Emmanuel Asare came across a pile of beer bottles,
coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm
Gallery on Wednesday morning. I hope that Mr. Asare was immediately
given a large raise. Someone who can make mistakes like that is an immensely
useful chap to have about.

Losing
our religion (Theo Hobson)
It has become unthinkable for a Church leader, or any public figure
who is a Christian, to speak as if the gospel of Jesus Christ is superior
to other creeds; to talk about Christianity as an exceptionally, uniquely
good thing. In public, at least, such talk is taboo. Some of the bishops
might still say this sort of thing in their pulpits; maybe the Blairs
tell their children. But it is not for public hearing.